Singh's world

Talvin Singh is late, but there is the excuse that he is probably the busiest man in New York. DJ-ing at the swanky Virgin Megastore on Union Square, Talvin is on the run with live performances, radio appearances and as many press interviews as he can squeeze in - there may even be slots allocated in the schedule carried by his record company minder for occasional bouts of eating and sleeping, when the time can be found.

He scurries into the shop with a shoulder bag of white labels and hits the decks. Before the first record has stopped spinning, fans, shoppers and curious onlookers are slowly grooving to the sounds of Talvin's Asian underground, as the mix between swirling ethnic percussion and electronic tones takes shape. DJ-ing in a record shop with escalators going up and down in front of you may not possess the same atmosphere as the Blue Note, the seminal London club that Singh called home for many Monday nights, but when you're selling an album as colourful and ambitious as OK, you'll put your stall out in the strangest of places.

OK is an album which crosses many boundaries. The work of a hyperactive classical Indian musician based in the melting pot of East London and working on the cutting edge of dance culture, it could be called a world music album for people who didn't think they liked world music albums. While the musical strains on OK are far removed from the common perceptions of world music, an album which was recorded in London, New York, Madras and Okinawa with a galaxy of musicians joining in at each stop is bound to have pan-global strings attached.

Only someone like Talvin Singh could truly direct this gorgeous fusion of classical themes and futuristic arrangements with such verve and intent. Acknowledged as the leader of London's burgeoning Asian dance underground - thanks to his legendary Anokha club and his marshalling of last year's Sounds Of The Asian Underground compilation album - Singh has an impeccable musical CV.

He began to play the tablas (the North Indian percussion instrument consisting of two drums) when he was three, and went to India to play alongside the masters of the craft when he was 15. Unable to adhere to the rigid bureaucracy and traditions of that classical school, he returned to Europe and began to make his mark through collaborations with other artists. He has worked with Bjork, Madonna, John Martyn (the spectacular Sun Shines Better remix), Sun Ra (the out-there jazzman even named a track after him, Singh's Thing), Siouxsie And The Banshees (check Kiss Them For Me), new classical find Joanna McGregor and countless other Western acts looking for Eastern vibes. And he still finds time to teach the art of the tablas to the next school - you'll find quite a few south London cabbies driving around with a tape of Singh in full flow booming from the stereo.

For Singh, the delights of OK come from the variety of influences he has taken on board down through the years. "The album is a summing up of my vision of music as a whole," he says. "It can't be categorised. I've been absorbing this music from all round the world, like Indian music, hip-hop, jungle, Okinawan music, rock. This is an album which took 10 years to make; it's like my magnum opus. It's very important because I like doing the mad, wicked dance stuff but this had to come out of my system first."

He's in no doubt as to what he is bringing to the dance music table. After all, the genre's previous flirtations with Asian sounds - which extended as far as knocks on the door from Transglobal Underground, Nation Records, Apache Indian and bhangra without ever receiving an invitation across the threshold - did not exactly set the world on fire or create a new template. "I see the whole dance thing as an outsider, but I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing," Singh explains. "My percussion and drumming is coming from a classical perspective, so what I'm doing is taking little bits of everything and applying it to create something entirely new."

The rich textures and flow of OK may owe a debt to Singh's magpie tendencies, but there are also master strokes which are clear examples of his skills and experience as a musical arranger. To hear - and see - how the interplay between tablas, sitars, strings, flutes, beats and movements build into mini-symphonies is a real education. "I'm just a mediator," Singh claims with a shrug. "Making music is a reflection of the environment around you and your personality as well."

The timing is certainly right for OK, with mainstream acts like Madonna sporting bindis and using Sanskrit throughout Ray Of Light in an effort to put some East in their muse. Singh has no problems with this: "The fact that they're not Indian doesn't matter. Kids in Bombay want to play electric guitars, they think that's exotic. Are we going to stop them from doing that? No, we're not. But one should learn about tradition.

"If I'm doing something, I want to know all about it, know where it's coming from and study it thoroughly. None of this came easy to me, I had to seek this stuff out."

Certainly, Singh has taken quite an amount from the traditions of his classical upbringing. "With music, people really want to get into another world," he says. "They don't want to be reminded of their lives - they want to escape. But music shouldn't be just entertainment, it's a much deeper subject than that. I'm not so sure about tradition because at the end of the day, I don't really believe in what it is supposed to be about. With my music, I think about what I want to do for a really long time but when I do it, it's really fast, like Japanese painters. When you're a kid, you follow your intuition about what's going to be cool. You should really have that approach to everything."

It's a maxim that has served this wired and seemingly tireless 29-year-old well. Few others could make the connections and jumps between Indian classicists at London's Royal Festival Hall, jamming with Sun Ra and creating a new dance sub-genre with such ease. The ultimate post-modern mover and shaker, all Singh needs to get by are his tablas. "Volume now is just as important as frequency and rhythm. With the tablas I've got now, I can go on stage with someone like Massive Attack and play louder than any of them. Louder than even the guitars or the drums. I can rock that room all on my own!".