Baalti: 'Buttons'

The Sunday Music Drop is a weekly radio series hosted by the KQED weekend news team. In each segment, we feature a song from a local musician or band with an upcoming show and hear about what inspires their music.

Jaiveer Singh and Mihir Chauhan, of the group Baalti, met in college and started out making jam band-style psychedelic rock music. When they both moved to San Francisco, three and five years ago respectively, they shifted to producing electronic music together.

“Mihir makes the music, I make the jokes,” Singh said with a laugh. “We both do all of it and like, just whoever’s ideas are working better are the ones that make it into the tracks…It’s very free flowing for sure.”

Their songwriting process starts with a “kernel” of a song. When Chauhan starts a song, it’s usually a sample with some drums or a bassline, and Singh usually starts with percussion. This EP in particular, Better Together, was heavily influenced by the experience of playing in clubs.

“All the songs really came together on stage…We’d take kind of raw, unfinished versions of these songs and chop them up and play them, like, in some kind of improvised way during our live sets,” said Singh. “And then over the course of many shows, we’d see how people were reacting and what versions we liked, and that’s kind of how the songs came to be. So they are really informed by that feeling of being in a sweaty nightclub with 100 people packed into a tiny space.”

Singh described “Buttons” as his favorite song off the EP. He said it was the first song that felt like it conveyed a fresh emotion that he and Chauhan hadn’t felt in a while, and really tapped into what they were trying to do as Baalti.

“It’s one of the first songs we’ve ever made that we were like, ‘Wow, this is actually something we’re really proud of and can’t wait to put out,'” said Singh. “It also got us out of a creative rut. I have like, an emotional response to the song now ‘cause it got us out of months of writing block with just one song that kind of unlocked everything again.”

They consider the music they make UK-inflected dance music. “I want to say underground dance music, but nothing’s really underground anymore when all of dance music is kind of mainstream now,” he said.

While their old psych rock sonic aesthetics didn’t make it into their project together as Baalti, Singh said their roots have led them to approach their songs from more of a songwriting perspective than other electronic music producers. “It bleeds into the way we think about vocals and hooks and the narrative of a track.”

Singh and Chauhan have been best friends for years, which Singh said makes them good collaborators.

“It’s very easy to critique each other, and no one gets hurt,” he said. “It’s very easy to just be like, the best idea wins, rather than ‘oh, I wrote that drum part, so it must stay.’ It’s also really tender, which is a really good thing to have when you’re out playing shows for a few weeks.”

Chauhan had a running list of band names he liked, and Singh picked out Baalti. “It means bucket in Hindi and it’s pretty meaningless. But I liked how it sounded,” said Singh. “And then I was like, ‘yeah, let’s run with Baalti.’ And Mihir was like, ‘yeah, this is probably a joke.’ And then we started sending demos out and then we started releasing music and he was like, ‘OK, we are really running with this name, I guess.’ But yeah, I like that it’s meaningless and kind of shape-taking rather than enforcing.”

Singh credited the Bay Area music community for giving them a platform and an audience to play for when no one knew who they were.

“There’s really sick DJ communities out here and the sound that they’re pushing bleeds into the way we DJ,” he said. “There was no Baalti before San Francisco.”

Baalti will be playing at Monarch in San Francisco on Sept. 30 for the Portola After Party. They also have a remix bundle coming out soon. Listen to their EP, Better Together, on Spotify here, and follow them on Instagram @baalti.mp3.