Ashutosh Sharma
Malhotra co-founded Amarrass Records in his native New Delhi.
It was 8 p.m. under ink-black skies when Ankur Malhotra and his business partner Ashutosh Sharma turned off the SUV and walked to the door of the one-room hut. They had spent the last two days bouncing like beans inside the Mumbai-built Mahindra truck and now found themselves 1,000 kilometers from their New Delhi home and 400 dusty kilometers into the Indian desert. The road, says Malhotra, “disappeared into the sand” hours before.
There were no maps to their destination, a village called Raneri in District Jodhpur. “You’d stop at the crossroads and ask a person who was kind of sheltering under the slim shade of a scrawny tree how to go,” says Malhotra. It was December 2010 and Malhotra and Sharma, New Delhi friends since preschool, were about to hit pay dirt in their odyssey to locate and record Indian folk music masters.
After several knocks, the door swung open and there stood 60-year-old Lakha Khan, one of the last living masters of folk music from the culturally rich Manganiyar region of the Thar Desert. “We introduced ourselves and how we came to learn about him — that other singers had mentioned his name,” says Malhotra.
“He looked at us strangely and picked up his instrument and played us a tune. And then, basically, said fuck off.”
Malhotra, who splits his year between Madison and New Delhi (and is well known as one of the faces behind the Musique Electronique stage at Madison’s La Fete de Marquette), is telling the story on the front porch of his near-east side home. He has long, curly black hair, a sculpted face and a deep, smoke-burnished voice; he chooses his words with the precision of someone who learned the King’s English.
Ankur Malhotra
Amarrass Records’ storefront.
Malhotra came of age during the closed Indian economy of the 1980s. Very little recorded music flowed in from outside the country. Commercial music of his childhood was dominated by Bollywood soundtracks. Lucky for the music-loving boy, his father traveled internationally and always left the house with a list of albums to bring back: Stones, ABBA, the Grateful Dead, Hendrix. It would be years before Malhotra immersed himself in the music of his own culture.
Malhotra earned an undergrad in mechanical engineering at Bangalore University and finished his master of business administration at UW-Madison in 2001, maybe the only MBA candidate in UW history to quote Bob Dylan in a final thesis on entrepreneurship. Throughout those years he kept in touch with his old friend and future business partner. “I’d bring back blues records for Ashu and it struck me that for a country the size of India there was still hardly any music being recorded and performed from India. Just Bollywood Bollywood Bollywood,” says Malhotra.
Malhotra says the sounds of Indian folk music surrounded him when he was growing up. He saw some musicians perform at festivals, giving him a base knowledge of the form. But who were the old practitioners? Where did they live? He learned that some of them actually found their way to performances at venues like the Kennedy Center and Sydney Opera House only to return home and “disappear into the desert.” How could that be?
It seemed inevitable that Malhotra would take those questions back home to India, and set off to find answers with Sharma. In 2010, with two microphones and a Sony cassette field recorder on loan from a Seattle friend, they left New Delhi on the first of 10 expeditions.
It was clear that Lakha Khan was finished with his song, but the men were not satisfied with his one-tune performance. They asked for more. They asked to record. “Maybe he saw something in us. Maybe something in our actions or our tone of words,” says Malhotra. Khan sat in silence for a few moments. Then he sent them out to the truck to retrieve their recording equipment.
That night, beneath one, low-wattage incandescent bulb, Malhotra and Sharma captured the sounds of a thousand years. Khan is the master of the 27-stringed sarangi. “Sa” stands for 100. “Rang” means colors. They recorded multiple takes of a song, a tune that, in the tradition of Indian folk music, never really stops. At the start of a new take, Khan would literally start where he left off — not at the “beginning” of the song.
The New Delhi record label the friends founded right about that time is aptly named Amarrass Records: “Ama” for eternal, and “Rass” for the essence of things. Khan is among just under a dozen artists now on the label, part of a stable of talent that includes The Blue Infinity, an Indian ensemble that explores Persian/African meditations; the multi-layered secular Manganiyar Seduction; and Milwaukee’s Painted Caves, the company’s first U.S.-based act.
Amarrass has the distinction of being the first Indian label to be cutting records on vinyl in the 21st century. The partners purchased the vinyl machinery in January from an old German named Ulrich Sourisseau who fabricated the devices and has been making vinyl records in rural Bavaria for decades. Sourisseau trained them at his shop, called Souri’s Automaten, over the course of several days.
Two Ikea lamps now warm the poly vinyl chloride (PVC) blanks in the small, Amarrass storefront in New Delhi. Malhotra and Sharma are in full record production, as well as touring with and promoting traditional and new Indian music performers. One of their most popular acts, global beats practitioners the Barmer Boys, was discovered in bits and pieces on that same 2010 expedition — all living within 50 miles of the Pakistan border. The band’s singer gave Malhotra goosebumps when he first heard him.
While ancient music from the Indian desert and beat/electronic music seem, well, worlds apart, Malhotra’s American music preoccupation is beat and house music. It’s a genre he mines deep as founder — and current co-producer with Jason Van Nurden — of the Musique Electronique stage at La Fete de Marquette, which takes place in Central Park in July.
Malhotra says ancient music and beats have a common appeal: authenticity. As a listener or as a dancer, “you can be yourself even as you lose yourself.” And so, for the joyful Malhotra, it follows that there’s no distance at all between truths flowing from beats of inner-city Detroit and mystical sounds in Lakha Khan’s hut on a dark night in the middle of the Indian desert.
“He could make a grown man cry,” Malhotra says of Khan. “And that is like being in the presence of a sorcerer.”
