What does it take to reboot cutting-edge South Asian music from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s? This duo

In the early 1980s, in Thatcher’s Britain, a little-known British-Indian band called Pinky Ann Rihal was busy inventing a brand-new sound—Hindi new wave. Their debut album—1986’s Tere Liye—was a compelling, free-wheeling amalgamation of woozy synths, prog-rock guitar riffs, syncopated drum patterns and charmingly amateurish Hindi vocals. Funky, tense, and quirky in equal measure, the music on Tere Liye still feels vital and subversive today.

This was pre-internet and pre-Spotify, when Indian audiophiles would rely on their families abroad to bring back some music. But Tere Liye didn’t achieve that cult status. In fact, the album sank without a trace, and the Mumbai-based label that put it out failed to do any marketing around it, even incorrectly labelling it as “Hindi disco”. A customs issue held up the shipment of records at Heathrow, and South Asian record stores in Southall refused to stock the few copies that made it through. The biggest problem was that, in the pre-streaming, pre-globalisation era, their music fell into a cultural no-man’s land—too brown for the West, too Western for South Asia.

“It’s a pattern we see over and over again, where a South Asian act would come up with a cool new sound, record an album, but then get zero support from the industry,” says Raghav Mani, co-founder of Los Angeles-based label Naya Beat Records, which reissued Tere Liye in 2022. “Western labels would say, this stuff is too South Asian for us. An Indian label might grudgingly put it out but do nothing with it. And then these amazing records got lost in a storage unit or were just thrown away.”

With Naya Beat, Mani (aka DJ Ragz) and co-founder Filip Nikolic (aka Turbotito) aim to give forgotten gems like Tere Liye—and the people who made them—a much-deserved moment in the spotlight. Like crate-digging archaeologists, they’re unearthing forgotten chapters of our musical past, rewriting history to highlight the unsung heroes of late-20th-century South Asian music from India and the Indian diaspora.

“It’s not about unearthing dusty, mothballed music just because it’s old and obscure,” says Mani of the label’s curatorial focus, which has so far included Balearic pop from Mumbai, bhangra-house from the UK, and soca-infused chutney music from Trinidad and Tobago. “We want to find and put out South Asian music from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s that was cutting-edge and timeless—stuff that’s just as relevant today as it was when it first came out.”

Like many of music’s best origin stories, this one too begins in a bar. Specifically, Gold Diggers, a dimly lit former strip club in LA’s East Hollywood, home to a popular party called Heatwave, where resident DJs Daniel T and Wyatt Potts would spin funk, disco, and house records from all over the world. That’s where Mani and Nikolic first met.

We want to find and put out South Asian music from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s that was cutting-edge and timeless—stuff that’s just as relevant today as it was when it first came out.”

It quickly turned out that the two had a lot in common, beyond a shared affinity for cross-cultural sounds. They were both quintessential third-culture kids. Mani was born to Indian parents in the Philippines and grew up in Geneva. Nikolic is from Denmark and spent time living in Yugoslavia as a kid before making his way to Los Angeles. Both also had fathers with deep, eclectic record collections and a love for audio gear—passions that they would soon inherit.

Sometime in 2019, Mani began working on a mixtape culled from obscure South Asian dance and electronic records from the 1980s that he had picked up over a lifetime of crate-digging. But no matter what he tried, the mixtape just didn’t sound right. His friend and DJ Daniel T pointed him to Nikolic, who had already gained a reputation for his unique approach to mixtapes.

“When I was with [American chillwave band] Poolside, I made a couple of mixtapes where I would pretty much edit all the music, do additional production, and remaster the tracks, all to make it even more seamless,” says Nikolic. “And that was the perfect approach for the music that Ragz had, because the audio quality was so rough that it would hurt you to listen to it at a club.”

The two got to work, giving these decades-old songs a sonic facelift, adding new elements to rework them for contemporary dance floors. Somewhere along the way, they figured that if they were already doing the hard work of finding the original rights and clearing them—necessary to monetise the mixtape on Apple Music—then they might as well go the whole hog and put out a proper compilation. From there, the idea of a reissue label was just a quick mental hop away. “We spent a year trying to clear the rights,” says Mani. “There’s a reason why there hasn’t been a South Asian reissue label before. It’s because the licensing is an absolute nightmare.”

One artist went back and forth over a hundred emails, asking why they didn’t choose a different song from her catalogue. Another artist’s lawyer insisted on only taking calls at 3 am, only to not show up half the time. Deep into the process, one Indian label—which owned the rights to five songs originally meant to be on the compilation—demanded that the entire production consist of only tracks from their catalogue. Mani and Nikolic had to scrap them and scramble for replacements. “Having those five tracks taken away forced us to really think deeper about what this compilation and label were all about,” says Mani. “There are all these amazing diaspora music movements around the world, like UK bhangra and chutney music from the Caribbean, and we ended up tapping into that a lot more.”

Their first, Naya Beat Volume 1: South Asian Dance and Electronic Music 1983-1992, released in June 2021 and made quite a splash in the small but thriving vinyl reissue scene, ranking first in Vinyl Factory’s list of 2021’s best reissue albums. Each follow-up release—including the Tere Liye reissue, an EP of acid-house and dub remixes of classic UK bhangra tracks by Manjeet Kondal, and a second volume of the Naya Beat compilation—has built on the success of the last. Last year, Naya Beat Volume 2 earned rave reviews from Pitchfork and 4Columns, cementing the label’s place as the South Asian answer to Habibi Funk.

That first compilation also led to a fruitful working relationship with Asha Puthli, the incredibly talented and iconoclastic Indian-American singer and songwriter who worked with Ornette Coleman and Del Newman, hung out with Andy Warhol, and whose music has been sampled by Notorious B.I.G and 50 Cent. Puthli was living in retirement in Florida when Mani and Nikolic reached out to her after having featured her song ‘Chipko Chipko’ on the compilation. In Florida, they started digging through her archives to see if they wanted to do something with the rest of her catalogue. “For four days, we spent eight- to 10-hour days digging through her storage unit,” remembers Nikolic. “Every night we’d go home to our Airbnb, go through the hard drives, and find all this amazing stuff. It was really exciting and crazy.”

In 2023, Naya Beat put out Disco Mystic, an EP of selected remixes of Asha Puthli’s songs by the duo and a bunch of other contemporary DJs and producers. A year later, they took the then-79-year-old on a tour of the US, UK, and Australia, her first tour in 44 years. After decades spent in obscurity, Puthli is now having an unprecedented revival. There’s a music documentary on her career by Shruti Rya Ganguly in the works, and Puthli is back at putting out new music, starting with a collaboration with Brooklyn psychedelic band Say She She later this year. This month, she will be honoured at the Women Songwriters Hall of Fame in Washington DC.

“It’s amazing to see the recognition she’s getting and know that some part of it is due to us,” says Mani. “If we can tell the stories of these incredible musicians, and get them their dues, then that’s mission accomplished, right? That’s what it’s all about.”