Review: ONNO Collective’s ‘20g’ Showcases India’s Experimental Fringe with Disco Puppet, Pardafash, Krishna Jhaveri & More

Through live events, releases and mixes, ONNO Collective has become one of the leading new platforms championing the leftfield musicians of India, and the 4th edition sees its annual compilation become more and more of a who's who of the genre in India.

More starkly, with compilations often being the place where artists exorcise the odd track knocking around in their hard drives, the 20-track compilation – which is called '20g' – also serves as a place for known acts to offer excursions beyond their usual style or going further towards their experimental edges.

Esrtwhile Bangalore-based Disco Puppet leans more toward expressing dissonant emotions through equally dissonant guitar hits, scattered percussion rhythms and phrases falling apart on 'Fuck Your God'. Meanwhile, both Mumbai's Sanjay Das aka philterSoup and Goa/New Delhi's Aditya Kapoor aka flux vortex depart from their club-friendly output to play with creating emotional beds using echoes of disjointed synth tones and repetitive guitar patterns.

Radhapriya, formerly known as Noni-mouse, also asserts her new identity as Priyaji with an assembly of broken breakbeats that is (intentionally) held back in its native utility of moving the body through sustained basslines and chordal hooks, which would have landed just as well as fragmented ambient sections if unmarried from the groove.

Then there are experimentation regulars who make the bulk of the compilation with their reiteration of music's definition as organised sound. Captured or imitated found sounds and natural ambiences are organised like musical elements and met halfway through synthesised textures employed with the same motivation. That can refer to the exploration of ecological sounds by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay on 'Alaap', of natural and human-made noises intersecting by Catatacat on 'Noisy Neighbour', of bird-call imitation through machine learning by Nithin Shams on 'bbai bbai', of intricate sound design by Krishna Jhaveri on 'Listening is a gateway drug', and of abrasive sound design by pedal and module-maker Aditya Nandwana aka Sawhorse using his machines to the limits on 'The Peaceless Coexistence of Multiple Truths'.

Even New Delhi selector, archivist and record store owner Nishant Mittal aka Digging In India debuts as a producer on the compilation, finding odd clips from his collection and uncovering their resonances and rhythmic glitches. From this cohort, filmmaker and sound artist Neelansh Mittra aka kidsinthejungle stands out for pushing the approach with which music can evoke emotions and document memories. He uses his track to create a collage of recordings of his grandmother over harmonium drones – a simple but effective trick providing one of the sweetest listening experiences on the album.

'20g' is also out in the physical format with limited cassettes

While clearly there is a tying theme to a lot of the work, the approaches are contrasting enough that, regardless of ONNO Collective’s head honcho TITO+’s best efforts at tracklisting, this isn’t an album for a listen-through. What it is instead is a meeting point for the country’s sonic adventurers to gather with their experimentations.

Experimentation, and increasingly, compilations themselves, often mean raw works and uninhibited ideas. That is who ‘20g’ is primarily for: people who want to be part of a gathering of India’s leftfield artists or who want to see some of their familiar acts venture into their unfamiliar territories.

However, that is not to say that the 90-minute compilation comes without works that can stand on their own, independent of context. Besides kidsinthejungle, an instance of that comes from Pardafash, who delivers one of the few straightforwardly functional releases on the album besides West Bengal's debuting act Taka Dao and their synthpop work 'Gaytown'.

The Bangalore artist, who rarely releases music now, doesn’t diverge from her usual quality or style as she outlines the primal connection between ritualistic drums and chant-like synth noises with a techno-adjacent outing that manages to be both dark and upbeat. The standard of intentionality is raised further on 'message to angel' by Mumbai's Agambir Vijan aka breaking, who creates a poem with synthesised plucks and sustained tones splattering across with disintegrating echoes on 'message to an angel'.

A particular highlight comes from the elusive Oriental Systems, who uses feedbacking signals to create grounding grooving rhythms with morphing tones under which he encompasses most of what the rest of the album gathers: documentation (of rural folk musical sounds), experimentation and gathering non-musical elements into musical assemblies.

‘20g’ ultimately lands as a sprawling survey of India’s experimental fringe, less a front-to-back album than an archive of approaches. From club producers stepping outside their lanes to artists treating raw sound as their instrument, it is less a unified statement and more a timestamp on where the country’s leftfield community is at the moment. At that, it is the definitive compilation, especially when coupled with entries from its previous edition.

Words: Amaan Khan

Artwork: Eeshani Mitra