Artist Profile: Baalti
Artist Profile: Baalti
April 19, 2022
Regan Parrish
Regan Parrish, aka @femmelectric, interviewed Baalti about their history and happenings since their debut release in August 2021. Baalti has garnered much attention locally and abroad, and played a grip of gigs in major cities in both the US and India. The ingenuity of their sound and the positivity they radiate while performing is undeniable, and no doubt what makes them so impressionable.
Baalti at Shack15, Photo by Regan Parrish
“We made music that we hadn’t heard before, but wanted to hear.” I first heard of the buzzworthy duo Baalti ahead of a Fault Radio livestream at Empress Studio where we both played last September. Unfamiliar with the name, but intrigued by the hype for their live set, I checked out their debut release, and immediately added it to cart. The 4-track EP features 19 minutes of feel-good danceable music that, while electronically produced, sounds incredibly earthy and organic. Deep basslines and driving textured percussion anchor the floaty layers of adorning instrumentation, while boppy vocal samples subtly accentuate the songs with hints of India.
When I met the lads who comprise Baalti—Jaiveer Singh and Mihir Chauhan—at the Fault Radio event, I was immediately struck by their affable demeanors and enthusiastic support of all the DJs playing before them that day. They were just two high-vibing, approachable, down-to-earth guys, hanging out at Empress Studio. An excited crowd turned up specifically for their set and the joyful, hyped energy they created in the room was infectiously palpable. The ingenuity of their sound and the positivity they radiate while performing is undeniable, and no doubt what makes them so impressionable.
Since that day seven months ago, I’ve watched Baalti seemingly “blow up” with a rise in popularity and a slew of intercontinental gigs, and sought to catch up with them outside the club. Jaiveer, Mihir, and I chatted in their charming Mission District flat about their history and recent happenings after what seemed like a whirlwind of a winter/spring tour. Baalti, which translates to bucket in Hindi, originated as a half-baked idea from a friend while consuming a bucket of chicken. While the duo intended to change it eventually, the name has stuck; after talking to them, baalti seems like the perfect metaphor for their music and the process behind it.
The pair originally hails from India—Jaiveer from Delhi and Mihir from Bombay. Despite not having met until their freshman year of college in upstate New York where they played in a jam band together, the duo shares a similar music background in percussion. Both spent their early teen years playing drums in metal bands until each of their tastes began to shift.
For Jaiveer, New Orleans style second-line drumming took over. As he explained “it comes from funeral marches actually. I got into that style of drumming for a little bit. It’s super loosey goosey. They have a word for it. They call it chicken grease. It’s kind of like slipping between the cracks of the grid. I like that a lot. I think that’s been super informative for me and how I think about rhythm and how you can stretch it and form it.”
Mihir diverted his musical attention to hip hop: “Right before college, my senior year, my left turn [from metal] was instrumental hip hop, like a lot of J. Dilla, Pete Rock type of stuff. Also, I went through a big Soulection phase. People were doing some really crazy stuff with offshoots of hip hop and trap, so I think that got me into electronic music.”
After college, Jaiveer moved to Brooklyn and found himself in a house with no drum kit. Yet with a roommate versed in Ableton, he started making music on his laptop out of necessity. Artists like Aphex Twin, Jon Hopkins and Four Tet inspired his electronic music-making. “I liked Four Tet’s approach because it was very different from traditional music. It was way more involved with chopping and sampling, rather than trying to make melodies and harmonies. He was making music in an abstract way. I like this approach a lot, like a lot of his live set is just manipulating samples live. I think that's a very modern, digital, informed-by-the-world-we-live-in outlook on music, and you can do it all on your laptop, so that’s super liberating.”
Baalti in the Home Studio, Photo by Annika Chauhan
Meanwhile Mihir was living in San Francisco also producing music on his laptop, and highly influenced by Caribou. They were both going out to a lot of shows and exposing themselves to new sounds and artists. They exchanged music long distance and discovered that their tastes were converging around house music.
At the start of the pandemic, Jaiveer moved to Seattle, and the two began to work on music together, mostly over Zoom with only a single in-person visit that summer. They started to feel a real synergy through their collaborations. As Mihir shared, “That was the first time we were [thinking] we can actually come from very different approaches and make something that sounds pretty cool. The Zoom thing worked out surprisingly well. Workflow-wise, one person has to be sharing their screen and their audio and the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). If you’re on your own you have to think about both the mechanics of how to make your ideas happen and think about the ideas, but I kind of just separated it. So if I had the DAW open and I was screen sharing with Jaiveer, he’d be like ‘what if you tried that?’ His mind is just thinking of ideas, and I could focus on the execution. That made us churn lots of stuff really quickly. When either of us got tired of our role, we’d just swap.” Although they had both been producing music for 6-7 years independently, Jaiveer and Mihir agree that neither of them felt as confident in their individual creations as they did in their Baalti tunes. Mihir said, “After we made Kolkata ‘78 and a few other songs after that, I was like, this is the best I’ve ever felt about anything I've ever made and I want to do something with this.”
In January 2021, Jaiveer moved in with Mihir and Baalti was finally under one roof in San Francisco, working full-time jobs by day and making music together by night. Eight months later, they released their debut 4-track EP on the India-based label, Krunk Kulture. Mihir shared that more than an immediate mass response, they received acknowledgements and positive reviews from institutions they admire. “That was the most unexpected. Our favorite magazine was writing about us and that was really like, Woah, this is a cool moment for us,” Jaiveer said.
When I asked Baalti how they describe their music, Mihir replied, “sample-based dance music” with no promise to adhere to a certain sound, despite the distinguishable Indian influence heard on their debut. “I think that’s just what we were vibing on at the time. When we started the whole sample chopping, and using that in house music, it started off with a lot of jazz and then moved into afro-beat. We discovered this one record by Rupa, an old [disco] record from Bengal, and realized there’s a lot of this stuff out of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan as well. That’s the kind of music we were discovering and I think in our production we were just chopping up stuff we were listening to day-to-day. We were fascinated by a lot of this stuff that we used to hear in India while we were growing up there. At the time it was unremarkable to us because it was always around us, like, oh my grandma listens to that, the cab driver plays that. We didn’t think much of it back then, but now as producers we’re listening in a different and more active way.” Jaiveer added, “It felt way more fun to do something with those sounds and not the samples that all sound the same. If you rely too much on elements that everyone’s used, you’re going to end up making music that sounds like everyone else's, but if you just start off with an element that you haven’t heard being used before, it opens the possibility. There’s no blueprint to follow. No one’s chopped records like these. How do you do that? I don’t know, let’s find out.”
Baalti Gig in Delhi, Photo by Sehar Ahluwalia
Baalti emphasized that while they are currently interested in disco, funk, and folk, from and around their native country, they aren’t trying to make Indian-sounding music. Jaiveer explained, “There’s so much cheesy fusion music out there that exoticizes Indian culture.” Of the samples they’re using he says, “This is ear catching as music itself, not because it’s exotic…Music samples are going to be a very big part of our music because it's the creative form we are really into and have a lot of respect for. What we sample will change. We’re not trying to put ourselves in a box. It will always be the sounds and the music that informs the decisions rather than, Oh, we need to put something Indian in there.” Baalti vows to continually find unique and original source material. “There’s still a treasure trove of sounds we’re really stoked on,” said Mihir.
Baalti’s first live public performance for the Fault Radio live stream happened just a month after their EP release. The groovy, energetic broadcast garnered them much attention locally, and by November they were playing their first San Francisco venue, Public Works. For the live sets, Baalti explained that they would start from scratch and write new material, and that they now play 11-12 songs during one-hour sets. “We had a lot of half-baked ideas that we hadn’t written up a whole arrangement for or anything, but if we chop up the stems and make clips out of this, we could probably get something going for a solid four minutes,” Mihir said.
Cityfox Live in NYC, Photo by Chris Lavado
New ideas are now spawned from their live sets, not just sitting in the studio. “For a lot of the songs, we just make up arrangements for them on the spot. We’re just preparing the ingredients for a song. Then when we play them live they actually take shape. It’s literally instant feedback. Let me try this arrangement. Are people vibing to it? No, Ok. So tomorrow at a different show, we’ll try a different arrangement. And then we can go home and listen back to our live sets, and decide to put those things into the actual song. The stuff that you create on the spot when you’re in a dark sweaty room, surrounded by people comes from a very different headspace. Those ideas are really unique and I value them a lot,” Jaiveer said. Mihir added, “It’s a little more high-risk right now because everybody is listening, but if I pull this off it’s gonna be so epic so ok, fuck it, let’s send it, let’s try this thing.”
To wrap up 2021, Baalti also performed locally at F8 and Phonobar. Since the start of the new year, they’ve played six cities in India, including their hometowns of Bombay and Delhi, three gigs in Los Angeles, and the Cityfox festival in NYC. Of course I asked them to name their favorite, but in true Baalti form, they find value in each unique performance experience.
Of their India tour, they said it was interesting because the crowd would be a mix of friends, people just becoming familiar with their music, and people who were there to party regardless of who was playing. Both Jaiveer and Mihir’s parents came out to the gigs in their respective hometowns, and each family also hosted intimate, inclusive backyard gatherings which made for memorable, sentimental reunions.
They boasted Cityfox at Avant Gardner, a 3-room mega-venue with a 10k capacity, as having the best sound, being the most professional, and where they were presented with their first rider, which fulfilled their request for a bottle of gin, but failed to supply their bev of choice, Guayaki Yerba Mate. In Los Angeles, they were booked to open for the duo Lastlings on their sold-out 3-night run. They commented that this was the most educational of the gigs as they had zero Baalti fans in the room, yet (not surprisingly) won each crowd over.
Cityfox Live in NYC, Photo by Chris Lavado
Baalti says that their current focus is not on gigging, but finishing production of their second EP, which they’ll soon be shopping around to labels (hint, hint). However, luckily for us, they have one upcoming gig on the calendar this Saturday, April 23rd at Public Works alongside Chloe Robinson and Tin Man, plus local faves Suade and Philco. Though they are in heavy production mode and being very selective about accepting gigs, when I asked them if this included DJ set gigs, their response was…
Jaiveer: I wanna DJ more, dude.
Mihir: Same.
Before we parted ways, I asked them what they are loving right now, besides yerba mate and the new Joy Orbison album that was playing upon my arrival. Mihir told me that he is loving his sleep, more daylight hours, a vibrant new work of art (that hangs in their living room), and his roommates. Jaiveer seconded the art and roommies, and added to his list the video game Sifu, and the TV classic Punk’d.
Cityfox Live in NYC, Photo by Chris Lavado
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Regan Parrish is a sonic storyteller and activist under the name femmelectric. She is committed to supporting women in electronic music and passionate about both the preservation and evolution of San Francisco’s dance music culture. Regan served on the core team for Revive the Night, an initiative for SF dance music venues that raised over $45k during the pandemic shutdowns, and has hosted numerous women-focused music events annually.
