Published in the December 2007 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 20 - Number 12
By Justin Hampton

Thanks to the long-running success of her monthly Basement Bhangra party, Rekha Malhotra has broken out beyond the bounds of New York’s five boroughs. Now nearly every media type and cultural-events producer across the country recognizes DJ Rekha as the go-to gal for a tight and enthusiastically programmed tutorial in Bhangra.

Confined for centuries to the North Indian region of Punjab, Bhangra over the past two decades has fused with many urban music styles, from hip hop to house and dancehall. And while Rekha certainly focuses her sets upon a slower, R&B/hip hop-inspired tempo than her 2-Step/garage-oriented U.K. brethren, she chooses not to label herself a Bhangra DJ per se.

“I just really feel like I’m a DJ who plays Bhangra music,” she declares. “My musical tastes are really varied, and I think my aesthetic is just to make people dance, and I really can’t really put a finger on what makes me different. It’s just like I have a certain ear for a sound that sounds good to me.”As a longtime reader of DJ Times, Rekha can certainly relate to the plight of DJs plying their trade in any musical style, though she warns that, internationally, Bhangra is a unique beast for each place you may play it. Wedding DJs, for starters, have a whole catalog of music with lyrics specifically related to weddings—these tunes don’t work at clubs. That’s not a problem for Bhangra DJs in the U.K., where the most popular jocks can play weddings alongside club gigs without fear of being stigmatized. Meanwhile in India, Bhangra’s popularity was restricted to Punjab until the worldwide success of Punjabi MC’s “Beware Of The Boys.”

Even then, Rekha notes, “They really like house music and trance music. They’re really heavily influenced by the Goa sound... It’s really more global now, and hip hop has made it out there, crossover stuff. [But] I played there a while back, and I definitely had to bring some house music. I was playing a lot more house then in my sets in general, but stuff I would never have to resort to here.”

The state of Rekha’s art is captured on her first-ever mix CD, DJ Rekha Presents Basement Bhangra [Twisted/KOCH International]. Rekha, in particular, singles out Tigerstyle, Dr. Zeus and Punjabi MC as favorite producers on the mix, going so far as to single out New York’s Sunil Sehgal as “the next thing in Bhangra for sure.”

Alongside Sehgal, Rekha co-produced the album’s thrilling leadoff track, “Basement Bhangra Anthem.” She describes her role as programming beats and devising basslines on the microKORG—meanwhile Wyclef Jean and Bikram Singh rock the mic and get the party started right.

Sequencing for “Anthem” was performed on Logic, but the more dub-flavored “Bhanghall” production with Dave Sharma was sequenced in Cubase. And unlike many sample-based Bhangra tracks, all the instrumentation—from the characteristic dhol drum sounds to the high-pitched tumbi and the tambourine-like daf—were recorded live, often over and over again, to get the sound right. 

“[The dhol is] a big drum, and it’s tricky business how to mic it,” says Rekha. “The success of a good Bhangra track is if it sounds like one drum. To achieve that, you need several things going on, and that’s tricky business in terms of layering and making it sound like it’s one hit. But it’s not. I mean, the ‘Basement’ track has about 30 tracks in it, 30-plus.”

When back on the decks, Rekha favors the Pioneer DJM-800 mixer, the Pioneer CDJ-1000 MK3 CD players, turntables and an outlet to plug in Serato—she interchanges between CDs, MP3s and vinyl. She’s also just now starting to enter into the world of Ableton Live, and hopes to learn it well enough to integrate it into her sets soon.

But for the most part, Rekha prefers to keep it very simple in her sets, technique-wise. “I don’t do a lot of DJ trickery,” she says. “I respond to what people play and how people dance on the floor. I think programming is really what gets people going on the floor. So I like to just make things smooth and continuous. And a couple of times, I just slam things on just for the drama effect. And I think that’s my style, just to build and take people somewhere.”