Almass Badat’s Future Desi playlist will get you pumped for Dialled In Festival
Ahead of the first ever Dialled In Festival, DJ and broadcaster Almass Badat makes us a banging playlist of the South Asian sounds you need to know.
Tara Joshi
10 Sep 2021
Safirah Irani
You might have noticed a lot of noise about South Asian music in the UK’s press lately. Of course, South Asian artists in the diaspora and back in the region have been pioneering in unfathomably beautiful, intricate, innovative culture for thousands of years, but we all know the global north music industry and British media are historically very racist, so they pick and choose when they pay attention.
Enter Dialled In, a London-based festival that is run by Daytimers, Chalo and No ID – all groups made up of people from the South Asian diaspora (and, to clarify, that doesn’t just mean ‘Indian’). Dialled In is celebrating the incredible breadth of our musical talent, unconfined by the limitations and boxes of genre and expectation – and the reason that so many normally disinterested parties are paying attention to the scene now is because it’s impossible to ignore. This is a group of people taking the narrative into their own hands, not letting identity be commodified as a trend but a real community movement that knows, learns and reveres its history – and it feels so inspiring and important to see.
Almass Badat is a DJ and broadcaster (and occasional gal-dem writer) who will be performing at the inaugural festival this Saturday 11 September in Waltham Forest. As she preps to play, she’s curated a banging playlist for us featuring musicians, producers and DJs from the Dialled In line-up (including MIRZA, Manara, Darama, Shivum Sharma, Ahadadream and SUCHI) as well as selections beyond the UK (Omar, Karun, Lush Lata, November Rose and vedang). She calls it a taste of the global South Asian soundscape: Future Desi. This playlist will get you pumped if you’re attending, or can just spotlight some of the banging tunes you should hear regardless.
The future is now, turn up these heady club edits and get to know.
Dialled In is held on 11 September, Uplands Business Park, London E17.
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