As a tag team digging through their combined vinyl collection, Unnayanaa and Hamza Rahimtula have been bringing the house down. Anyone who has danced captivated to one of their back-to-back sets this year, in any of the go-to local haunts that the pair is making its way through, knows that that metophorical statement isn't a hollow praise.
After connecting at AQI (the multi-day event hosted by Hamza's Windhorse Records and Warehouse Mix), the two of India's most long-standing and deepest purveyors of house music tapped into a synergy that should have been obvious.
As such, their formidable 3-hour Wild City mix, which captures the pair's recent visit to Bangalore's Indiranagar Social, is a full mapping of house music's DNA. Genre staples like Ron Trent, Kerri Chandler and Louie Vega connect easily with the disco lineage of Dinosaur L and Sister Power while the African and Latin-rooted rhythms of the likes Africanism and Jafrosax provides a percussive throughline to the genre's legacy and influences across continents.
Delivered with a puristic sense of craft using only vinyl selections coming together over a rotary mixing, Hamza and Unnayanaa still bring a showmanship to the mix which times its exchange of rhythmic breaks and singalong beltings, almost using the records to communicate with the audience in a very literal manner. Then almost like an epilogue or a tantalizing post-credit section, the upbeat sets gradually shifts via grittier beats into a leftfield comedown in its final 15 minutes.
For tracklisting and more information: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/21287-wild-city-252-unnayanaa-b2b-hamza-rahimtula
