"This Is House Music for House Heads": Hamza Rahimtula Brings Rajasthan Folkstars To The Dancefloor — Without the Fusion

Hamza Rahimtula was cutting his teeth in the New York house music scene during his college years, delivering DJ sets alongside live instrumentalists (percussionist Frank Bambara being a notable collaborator) when he first thought of how “our own cultural sounds would fit in” with the music. Upon returning to India, the DJ-producer and soon-to-be Wind Horse Records label-head followed the thought to a folk music showcase by Jaipur Virasat Foundation, where he met khartal player Jaisa Khan. He exchanged numbers, not expecting much from it.

Soon after in 2009, instead of coming to Hamza’s house to record, Jaisa Khan turned up at one of his gigs in Delhi and ended up jamming together during the performance. “That wasn’t supposed to go down like that, but luckily for us, the crowd loved it,” recalls Hamza. “When we saw their reaction, we realised we have something special.”

The pair followed their bliss and invited a bhapang player and a morchang player to join them, and ‘Hamza Rahimtula and Rajasthan Folkstars’ was born.

The mini-ensemble performed around for a decade before COVID-19 forced a pause that allowed them to take a step back and reflect upon the work. “[Till then] we had only addressed the percussive aspect of this sound. We had not addressed the melodic or the vocals, or any melodic instruments. So for us, the job was half done,” recalls Hamza, who proceeded to invite Bhawru Khan on sarangi and Bhutta Khan on vocals to join him, Jaisa Khan (khartal), Firoz Khan (bhapang) and Shakoor Khan Langa (morchang and algoza) in his Hyderabad studio.

The folk musicians proceeded to audition their repertoire over basic grooves supplied by Hamza, out of which 10 were selected for detailed recordings. Hamza nearly took a year to digest the material before replacing his grooves and using the recordings in more fleshed-out arrangements, nearly abandoning the project upon his first attempts.

“I was quite hesitant because I'd never done anything like it,” says Hamza, who felt wary of fusion attempts and their tendency to run into the overtly kitsch and tokenism. “These recordings are intense, and sometimes it's like this space when things can go horribly wrong if you don’t get it right. You end up with something incredibly cheesy, and we didn’t want to do that.”

The producer steps over this pitfall in the work, now offered in the form of the 10-track album entitled ‘Origins’, by shaking off the weight of creating a “fusion” entirely. “This is house music for house heads”, Hamza insists multiple times during our conversation, and the album audibly substantiates that aim.

Anyone coming to the album with the expectation of discovering new musical lexicons might find themselves disappointed. ‘Origins’ is as straightforward and precise with just a flair of happenstance as the story of how it and the collaboration between its makers came to be, and adheres to the fundamentals of house music and its dancefloor-centric aims with Hamza’s well-honed grasp.

It simply invites the sounds from the Rajasthani folk music to contribute to it, just as elements from styles from around the world contributed to the genres through the decades of its existence. Khartal and bhapang rhythms uplift the four-to-the-floor thump of the beat just as congas and other Latin percussion have done in innumerable house tracks over the years, including tracks like ‘Algoza’ on this album. Sarangi phrases fill the space just as jazz piano often does in the genre, which it also does here in tracks like ‘Baras Baras’.

The choice of not focusing on the fusion of his sounds and those of the folk musicians but rather focusing solely on the shared aim of creating effective house tracks frees up the producer to pull elements from far and wide. He includes speech samples of Nelson Mandela on ‘Algoza’ and highlights the shared ancestry of Rajasthani tribes and Spanish gypsies with vocal motifs from the latter on ‘Gypsy Trail’.

Though the inherent musicality of the sarangi and the algoza add their characteristic mystique as a fresh flavour within the genre on tracks like ‘Sky’, the album isn’t defined by its experimentalism but by its ability to bring these sounds that are new to the genre to feel natural and almost basic to it.

“House music works with certain tempos. So, if a type of folk music has that tempo range, then it's a dream-like combination,” explains Hamza. “For example, Punjabi music doesn't work so well with house music, but with hip hop, it's like a dream. It’s because the rhythm patterns are at the speed of hip hop. Tabla works amazingly with drum and bass. Similarly, Rajasthani folk music, or even African folk music and Latin folk – there's a lot of in these cultures, sounds and rhythm patterns that are on the same tempo as house music. That's why technically it works so naturally.”

Hamza noted that even the folk artists’ musical approach fitted easily with house music as they were traditionally prone to weaving their songs and extended jams over consistent grooves, much like in dance music. However, while ‘Origins’ utilises this inherent synergy to invite the folk musicians to contribute to the aims of house music, it (most likely intentionally) limits itself to that. It doesn’t explore the possibilities in the other direction of examining how house music can enhance the songs from the folk musicians’ world.

The middle sections of tracks like ‘Earth’ and ‘Kanudo Ni Jaane’ though serve as exceptions to this in isolation as they let the immersive storytelling of Rajasthani folk music take limelight for a while – but in the larger context of the tracks, even that is used as a respiteful contrast before things go back to the visceral grooves.

The biggest exception of them all is ‘Ghumar’, which doesn’t just take in contributions from Rajasthani folk music but also the region's pop culture, featuring fluorescent bright synth melodies and synthetic string stabs over a disco bassline and even build-ups of doubling snares and kicks. It finds a middle path between the cultures without dumbing down, letting entire song structures of the folk musicians flow and the boldness of house music to venture into dissonant textures and syncopated breakdowns to shine. It's a rare moment where neither traditions lead – they truly dance together.

And the dancefloor responded. ‘Origins’ topped Beatport’s Organic House chart and cracked its all-genre Top 5 – a first for Hamza. For the folk artists, who predominantly come from areas around Jaisalmer, the global success of the album was celebrated with the help of the NGO Gunsar Folk Music Institute, which hosted the artist and felicitated them via Chaitanya Raj Singh, the descendant head of the erstwhile royal family of Jaisalmer.

“They honoured all the musicians and they celebrated amongst the community,” Hamza tells me, pointing how the collaboration has a whole other set of motivations within the community of Rajasthan’s folk artists, who want to cross into other genres and inspire younger generation to focus on the music with the lustre of global appeal. “Bax Khan, who runs the NGO, made a video and spread it in the community in Hindi and English, talking about how it's important. Because in Rajasthan, what’s happening is that they’re trying to cross the music over into other genres to create secondary incomes for the musicians,” he carries on.

In many ways, ‘Origins’ doesn’t reinvent either tradition so much as reframe them. Rather than fusing styles or seeking out novelty, the album works by finding a shared groove, using the structure and discipline of house music to welcome in the textures of Rajasthani folk. The melodies and rhythms shift to fit the grid, the vocals follow the emotional arcs of the dancefloor, and the folk instruments begin to feel like they were always meant to be there.

It’s not a balancing act between genres, but a carefully chosen direction – one that lets house music remain central, while trusting these folk sounds enough to let them carry weight. What emerges is not a meeting of two worlds, but a recalibration of how one can expand the other.

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Words: Amaan Khan

Main Image: Sachin Soni