The music created by British drum 'n' bass musician and tabla player Talvin Singh unites the classic traditions of the East with the modern dance-club textures of the West, a style he defines as "tablatronics." Rising to recognition in the mid-1990s, Singh was one of the first to introduce Indian music to today's mainstream youth and to simultaneously inspire a new direction for emerging electronica artists.
Singh released his first solo outing. OK, an East/West fusion album populated by arrangements of strings, breakbeats, and tablas, won for Singh the highly coveted Mercury Music Prize. One of the most memorable tracks, the rhythmically complex "Mombasstic," discussed his father's experience of ejection from East Africa. Listening through this piece and the remaining songs, all held together with trance-like rhythms, one is alternately confronted with both chaos and order. Strikingly, these disparate forces blend and transition seamlessly in the hands of Singh.