City To City

Delhi 2 Dublin perform an irresistible mash of dance music laced with Celtic and Bhangra. Their intensely physical musical border-hopping around Planet Electric startles our Patrick Langston.

Sure, sure, says Tarun Nayar, tabla and electronics man with Vancouver’s Delhi 2 Dublin, the band is career-oriented. They want to sell lots of albums, play bigger and bigger festivals, make lots of money. “You have to humour your managers and publicists by saying that. And money is important. But really, my goal is to party and have fun.”

That estimable party and fun goal—as you’ll know if you’ve heard Planet Electric, the irresistible new album by this five-member outfit—is precisely what this mashed-up bunch achieves musically. Gathering electronica and world beat into one rowdy big top, they fuse Punjabi and Celtic, accenting the mix with reggae, hip-hop and pretty much anything else that strikes their fancy. The result is joyous. Unexpected. Energizing.

“The only thing we consciously set out to do is to move people,” continues Nayar on the phone from Hong Kong where, at the end of May, the band played four showcases at the mammoth Asian music conference Music Matters. “That often ends up happening out on the dance floor.”

That DJ-like, spontaneous combustion Nayar and company spark among dancers echoes the band’s genesis. Just three years old, they originally teamed up for a one-off performance during Vancouver’s 2006 Celtic Fest. Audience and band members alike were instantly enthralled with the collaboration, and within a year Delhi 2 Dublin were in Ottawa, opening Canada Day celebrations before 40,000 people on Parliament Hill. (The event included a handshake from Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whom Nayar, not a man to keep opinions to himself, called a “dickhead” in a subsequent interview, while allowing that it was pretty cool to meet the PM).

Since then, they’ve played everywhere from the Vancouver Olympics to SXSW in Austin, TX. Their self-titled debut release hit No. 3 on the Canadian Chart Attack world music charts. Planet Electric, whose title pretty much sums up the band’s music, is their second album of new material. It features, along with Nayar, Kytami on fiddle, Sanjay Seran on vocals, Andrew Kim on electric sitar and guitar, and Ravi Binning on dhol, a double-headed barrel drum whose popularity in India dates back to the 15th century.

And while the band is clearly having a blast with what they’re doing, they’re also very obviously good at what they do. They’ve found the balance between fun and professionalism while creating a sound that’s at once intensely physical and musically substantial.

You can hear plenty of that balance live this summer, by the way: Delhi 2 Dublin are playing festivals across Canada and touring below the border.

Onstage, says fiddler Kytami from Hong Kong, the music translates into something special. “I love that it is a positive thing and I get to share my gift with people. Also, because it’s an instrument and there is no language barrier, I can communicate with people no matter where they come from. Music is energy and there’s no better feeling than when you can get everyone in a room feeling the same thing and forgetting about all their inhibitions from the outside world.”

Asked if there’s a musician she most admires, Kytami answers in a way befitting a genre-bending artist in a world where multiculturalism and cross-fertilization is the new normal: she loves everyone from Guns ’n’ Roses’ Slash (“an insanely great technical player, he’s got awesome style plus he’s passionate but hardcore”) to Yo-Yo Ma (“he stepped out of the boundaries of the classical realm to collaborate and compose his own music with an eclectic group of artists”).

For the unsuspecting listener, especially one schooled in popular music of the 1960s and ’70s, Delhi 2 Dublin’s cheeky, free-association fusing of such diverse genres can at first startle (boomer alert: surprise is a good thing). 

“To me, it sounds normal, I’m so inside it,” says Nayar. “It can make some people not take you seriously. Bhangra heads think the only thing that matters is Bhangra. Hip-hop, metal heads: it’s the same. But if I was serious all the time, I wouldn’t be in a Bhangra-Celtic band.”

The success of Planet Electric lies in part with the inspired mixing by Diamond (DJ Swami) Duggal, known for his work with the likes of Apache Indian and Maxi Priest. It takes one kind of skill to mix a country or folk album, where melody and lyrics are usually the focus, and quite another to tackle something where coherence hinges often on the mix of beats (one listen to Laughing Buddha, a bilingual and musical border-hopping call to live vigorously, will clue you in to exactly what intelligent mixing can do).

“You have to be comfortable with Indian music and electronica, and put that together with a poppy beat,” says Nayar. “Also, the mix is important because it lets you play the record on laptop speakers. Swami is the only guy in the world who could do it.”

Not ones to worry overly about convention, Delhi 2 Dublin road-tested the songs in concert before committing them to the album. None of this dramatic stuff about allowing only a couple of sneak, live previews before the big release date. All of which suggests that the band, by checking out audience response before recording the songs, is a little more marketing-savvy than it might appear.

They also huddled in a 10-day writers’ retreat, with some surprising results. Nayar’s song Tommy, for example, morphed radically when fiddle and voice were added, he says. 

“We were at day five or six, and had hit the wall when it was time to work on Tommy. At first, it was this epic tune with a drum and bass track. No vox, no weird key changes. It wound up nothing like what we started with. I write a lot of music, and you get really attached to your stuff. I had to totally let it go, but I can say it’s now much better.”

As to guiding principles in the band’s music and performances, he says simply, “There’s a certain feeling in our songs: elation, happiness, raw, crazy, wild, energy, cultures meeting.”