  In the past, Talvin Singh has been fixed in print: an Asian artist, an Eastender, a tabla virtuoso. In fact, he moves fast between worlds, making connections, building an autonomous zone In which the forward spirits of 21st century music - young Indian players, New York nomads, London futurists - can coexist.
"Space is the place" said Sun Ra, bandleader from Saturn. Space has become a personal environment built through music, an imagined geography made from Impressions of real places and a confusion of cultural ties, mixed together with fantasy regions, vanishing civilizations and emergent future.
O.K. his debut album, released October 98, is from the floating world, music that captures the feeling of movement between identities, cultures, destinations. Languages. A place between the body and digital processes. A zone of oscillation between traditions and heresy. In the gaps between genres, where music is currently at its most interesting. Or in the vast differences of scale between rural village and urban supersprawl. Everywhere is exotic; nowhere is exotic.
O.K. was created in the blur of travel - Okinawa, Kerala, Bombay, Madras - yet realized in Brick Lane, London, both a virtual space and a locus of real cultural struggles, a living history of peoples in transience, looking for firm ground. Travel gives perspective but also highlights confusions. "People have this idea of Bombay being a place with loads of poor people," says Talvin. "It's a crazy city. I find Bombay closer to New York than ~noon. You go to Bombay and every other person is a video maker. Rave music and techno is so big among Asian kids in India now. Sometimes I go to India and I know more about our instruments and culture than they do. They're somewhat less interested. That's the way the world is". Growing up in Leytonstone, he moved between different worlds; breakdancing to electo with other young Asians, listening to Secret Affair and The Jam; learning to play tablas within the exclusive, conservative world of Indian classical music. When Britains Indian classical promoters rejected him, deriding him as a punk who dared to questioning them Talvin decided to go his own way. He worked with Courtney Pine, Cleveland Watkiss, Bjork Little Axe, Future Sound of London, Bim Sherman, Sun Ra, finally releasing his own work as Drum + Space, overseeing Anokha, the sounds of the Asian underground.
But even the Asian underground can be twisted into a misnomer, a confusion Of ethnic origins with musical realities. Talvin points at his racks of digital technology programmed with sitar and tabla Sounds. "For me, it's the attitude, he says, distancing himself from the shorthand stereotype of a sitar sample. I've got a track on which I've got hardly any Indian instruments but my approach is more Indian or Japanese, where you think about something for four months but when you get down to the point . . . and he scribbles In the air, like a Japanese calligrapher, "it's list very, very fast.' O.K. took nine months to make, involving Okinawan and Indian singers, a string section from Madras, sarangi master Ustad Sultan Khan, trumpeter Byron Wallen, bass player BIll Laswell, guitarist Aziz Abraham, composer llaiyaraaia, young Indian musicians such as veena player Devi, flautists Rakesh Churasla and Naveen, vocalists Cleveland Watkiss and Shankar Mahadevan and actor Ajay Naldu, recently acclaimed for his role in Suburbia. Talvins infIuiences for the album were diverse, not always musical: Mombasstic relates to his father, ejected from East Africa in the Sixties by Idi Amin: Soni', sung over Bill Laswell's dub bass by 12 classical singers from Bombay, all women, was based on a folk melody from Pakistan; "Eclipse was inspired by hearing the screams of monkeys panicked by an eclipse of the sun over India, O.K emerged out of common links between Okinawan and Indian culture. "It was crazy,~ he says, "in a little city in Okinawa, when we were there. There were shops called Bombay Town, the signs In Okinawan writing".
Why was the album called O.K.? Because it's the most common word in the world," he says. "You go anywhere in the world and people know what OK is. Music shouldn't have boundaries. That's the way I've always seen music- Indian classical music, it's shocking how popular It is all over the world. It's just language, that everyone can identify with. That's the most valuable thing in music today. We're living in that time when things have gott to unite."
Visit Talvin Singh @ www.anokha.co.uk/tpage.html.
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