Dreamy synths shimmer over crisp, snapped-off club percussion. Finger-plucked santoor notes usher in a static-draped voice extending a simple invitation: “aa ja romance karein (come let’s romance).” The voice belongs to Nahid Akhtar, often called the Nightingale of Pakistan, lifted from a song that once filled discotheque dancefloors in Lahore in the late 1970s. Nearly half a century later, Baalti and Lapgan thread it into Romance, a club-ready bite of desi sampledelia.
The accompanying music video, directed by Mumbai film-maker Kevin Rathod, is just as densely layered. Wrestlers grapple in a mud akhara, their bodies locked in intimate poses that blur the line between sport, ritual and fraternal tenderness. In just 90 seconds, Romance travels across decades, borders and cultural traditions, weaving together Pakistani film music, pehelwani and contemporary club culture into an interrogation of South Asian gender and masculinity. It’s also tremendous fun.
Threads, the recent collaborative album by India-born Brooklyn-based duo Baalti and Indian-American Chicago native Lapgan, is full of these moments that collapse time and geography. Though their sonic approaches are different—Madlib-influenced hip-hop collage for Lapgan and bass-driven club music for Baalti—they share the idea of the archive as living raw material, ready to be moulded into radical new forms.
Lifting samples from Bollywood and Lollywood, regional pop music, folk and Hindustani classical, they recombine them to create what Passion of Weiss writer Pranav Trewn calls “a canvas for historical revisionist fiction”—creating sound-worlds where past, present and imagined futures collide in kaleidoscopic whorls of dhol, flute and subterranean bass. Every sample and interpolation points you in a new direction: another record, another film, another musician, another obscure, half-forgotten chapter of South Asian cultural history. In their hands, sampling becomes less an act of quotation than a way of telling old stories anew.
They aren’t alone. Artists like Excise Department, Kartik Sudhera, Todh Teri and Malfnktion have spent the past few years treating the subcontinent’s musical corpus not as a fixed canon, but as something to be pulled apart and reassembled. They’re less interested in recognisable Bollywood hooks (a la DJ Aqeel) than in forgotten arrangements, regional film scores, devotional recordings, dusty cassettes and private-press oddities—the kinds of records that remind us of scenes and musical histories which rarely make it onto algorithmic streaming playlists.
Writing about hip-hop, Rhodes College researcher Camille Lee Carleton argues that sampling functions as a form of historiography: "a sonic practice that preserves, reinterprets, and transmits historical experience." Her work is rooted in Black musical traditions, which have their own distinct history. But one of her central ideas resonates here too. Sampling, she writes, is "not citation but conversation"—rather than preserving the archive in aspic, it keeps it in circulation.
Few artists make that impulse more explicit than Lapgan. On 2021 beat tape Duniya Kya Hai, he used samples almost exclusively from Indian and Pakistan music to highlight the two rivals’ shared cultural inheritance, and to imagine a world in which harmony can still win over the politics of borders and division. His 2024 album History billed itself as "an imagined history and a musical thesis—a refutation of British colonialism through a tapestry of beats."
Track titles like Mughal Shit and Under The Bodhi Tree function as invitations to jump into historical rabbit-holes. “If you know, you know,” as the producer said in an interview. “But also if you don’t know, go read about it.” The beats are breadcrumbs, nudging curious listeners in the right direction without collapsing into didactism.
Reinterpreting the past
This impulse to recover and reinterpret the past extends well beyond the producers themselves. Across India and the diaspora, a loose ecosystem of collectors, record stores, reissue labels and party collectives have emerged, animated by the same instinct. There’s Nishant Mittal, who runs the Digging In India record store in New Delhi, and whose Instagram acts as a carefully curated archive of Indian musical treasures. His collection has provided the raw material for a whole wave of beatmakers, including Lapgan and Kartik.
Similarly, there’s Discostan—the party, label and multimedia archive curated by Hyderabad-born, LA-based DJ, film-maker and writer Arshia Haq—which has returned forgotten music from South Asia and the Middle East to the dance floor. In the process, it has also challenged the tendency to reduce the region's music to a grab bag of "exotic" sounds, insisting instead on its depth, diversity and continuing relevance.
These ‘rogue archivists’, to borrow a phrase from new media theorist Abigail De Kosnik, are essential, partly because the traditional institutions have done such a terrible job of collecting this musical heritage and making it accessible. Decades of music lies locked up in copyright vaults, a treasure hoard jealously guarded by label suits.
The occasional film soundtrack or major artist might be allowed just a taste, but only if they have deep pockets. And even then, the licensing process is byzantine (as one reissue label owner told me, “licensing [from Indian labels] is an absolute nightmare”). That means that these tracks are largely kept out of the streaming ecosystem, circulating via piracy, small-press records and club dance-floors. Like their source material, they're relegated to the margins, accessible only to those “in the know”.
Thankfully, that is slowly changing, as industry executives slowly come around to the idea that sampling is something to encourage rather than police, because every successful flip only extends the life of their precious catalogue. Last year, Sony India tied up with UK collective Daytimers to release 10 club remixes of Indian film tunes.
Earlier this year, Indian production and DJ duo Madstarbase got official sanction from the notoriously obstinate Saregama to put out officially licensed flips of songs from their catalogue (after years of getting takedown notices for the same tracks). “It rarely happens that illegal bootlegs get signed by a major label,” they told Wild City. “Ours did... legitimised by the labels themselves."
Perhaps that's why Threads feels like more than just an excellent record. It arrives at a moment when a new generation of artists is treating the musical past not as a fixed canon to be preserved behind glass, but as something that can still be argued with, remixed and reimagined. Nahid Akhtar's voice doesn't simply evoke a vanished Lahore disco. It finds another dancefloor, another generation of listeners and another story to tell. The archive survives not because it's protected from reinterpretation, but because artists keep finding new reasons to return to it.
Bhanuj Kappal is a Mumbai-based writer.