All around the world in dance music, the South Asian diaspora is carving a space for the culture they have carried from their roots to their adopted new homes. One of the leading forces among them: Stick No Bills. The Dubai-rooted collective started as a party spearheaded by Jeftin James aka DJ Jeff and GT, and immediately became a home for people who wanted to celebrate their desi sound and aesthetics proudly.
"Growing up in Dubai, there were South Asian parties, and there were “cool” nights — but rarely anything that did both well," the collective tells us as they made their way to Mumbai for BUDX NBA House to perform as well as discuss the push for South Asian representation on global stages. "If you wanted to hear your sound, you had to compromise on production or setting. If you wanted the aesthetics and energy of a good party, you had to leave parts of yourself at the door."
Consequently, the collective tapped into that hunger in themselves and people like them to create parties that didn't make them choose between experience and identity, accruing a community that included film and fashion into the fold just as seamlessly as the musicians of Stick No Bills combine global hip-hop and even pop sounds from their nostalgia of South Asian culture. The edits, flips and sets by Stick No Bills merge amapiano with Tamil samples, Jersey club beats with Punjabi vocals and classic film melodies with pumping grooves.
"Dubai is a paradox. It’s hyper-global but locally fragmented. You can hear 20 languages in a mall, but still feel like your culture doesn’t have a platform. That in-between-ness shaped everything about us — because we are the in-between," the collective explains us. "We don’t mix genres for novelty — we do it because that’s how we grew up hearing the world."
The collectives' Wild City mix reflects this as the visceral bass of Skrillex, Fred Again and Flowdan's 'Rumble' combines with the 1999 Bollywood number 'Ramta Jogi' or 2014's 'Patakha Gudi' soon flows out of the flutes running over Future's 'Mask Off'. The mix taps into pop moments as fleeting samples to create its own moments of recognition, choosing energy over cleanliness as it keeps the subs rumbling through hip-hop, dubstep and breaks.
For more information & tracklisting: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/21193-wild-city-250-stick-no-bills
