Yung Singh Launches Label 'EKTA' With New Single 'NUG46'

Yung Singh, one of the leading South Asian diaspora voices to emerge out of UK dancefloors, grows his event series 'EKTA' into a label, launching it with the single 'NUG46'.

"I want the label to be a sonic universe where artists bring their specific heritage into a modern club framework, it’s not just a Panjabi project, but a medium for cultural exchange," says the London-based DJ, producer and now label-head about the imprint which he describes as genre-agnostic and BPM-neutral. "It’s about merging diverse folk traditions to treat these sounds not as relics, but as the future of dance music."

The single itself moves in and out of the drum & bass territory. The genre's invigorating energy is infused into the sombre atmosphere of a rattling huge bass merging with atmospheric pads and recorded real-world ambiences.

The single is marked as an "intentional move away from the pressure to chase a commercial club banger or viral hype" and it shows. Yung Singh doesn't hold back when he launches into an onslaught of varied breaks at every interlude. They cascade as energetic risers and drop back into restrained motifs that had emerged out of the intro's field recordings and get underscored by the breakbeat's 2-step skeleton and tabla flutters. To traverse the distance from experimental bold treatment of the breaks to atmospheric simplified sections is an adventure. Yung Singh undertakes it without losing the track's club-ready functionality.

'NUG46' is also the first single from Yung Singh's upcoming EP 'Bloom', which is set to release in June. Listen to it below and follow Yung Singh for more.

Image by sachdhanjal