An exploration of West Bengal soundsystem culture in 10 tracks, curated by Baalti

India-raised, New York-based duo Baalti are back with a brand new EP this month on Steel City Dance Discs, 'Mela' – a four-track, club-focused release influenced by the frenetic soundsystem culture of West Bengal. To celebrate, they've put together a playlist of tracks exploring that sound, from the roots of soundclash culture to "full on Dek Bass". Check it out below.

Dek Bass is an umbrella term for a huge range of music played out on massive soundsystems in India, mostly for celebration and often for competitive soundclashes or “box competitions”. 'Dek' refers to these competition songs usually being played on cassette tapes and decks – AKA Dek – and the decks themselves are an integral and respected part of the system.

West Bengal’s Dek Bass scene has been mutating and growing and evolving in really exciting ways, all thanks to the bossmen and operators and communities pushing the limits of audio and amplification tech for the past few decades. With the huge social media adoption in India in the last decade, these box competition videos are everywhere and spreading so fast.

On the surface, it's obvious to see why it's spreading so fast – it's because the videos look mental and massive and unlike anything people in the West have ever seen. But really, it's because it challenges the notion of what dance music is, and what environments it can be enjoyed in, and what raving is and what ravers look like. Also, purely sonically, the music is so good – it's raw and direct and heavy. It’s made to just push the speakers to their limit and really explore the boundaries of how we perceive sound in the body and mind.

When listening to this music, we were massively inspired by the next-level sound design and sheer power of the bass, the unapologetically hectic drum patterns, blaring sirens and occasionally interspersed film dialogue taunts. It felt more raw and physical and fresh than anything else going on around us, and we instantly started to see how we could connect it to the dancefloor sounds we're surrounded by now.

Here’s some of the tracks that really stood out to us as we went down the Dek Bass rabbit hole, pulling from corners of YouTube, free MP3 download websites, field recordings from friends, and WhatsApp Dek Bass producer groups.

It’s not a definitive guide at all, just a glimpse through our lens into a scene that keeps growing and resonating far beyond its roots.

The one that started it all for us! Hearing this one for the first time was such a lightbulb moment for us, connecting Bengali film music with bigggg soundsystem sonics and badass sound design. Love everything about this, the wild bass drops, lazer synths and sirens, and somehow it captures so much energy without even having a kick! Its influence seeped into our tracks like 'Overbit' for sure, and we’ve been sneaking this one into our mixes since all the way back in 2023 with our Mixmag Impact mix.

This one grabbed our attention because of how minimal it is. The arrangement is slow and spacious and lets you feel the full weight of the bass, making each note feel huge. Love how just three elements create such a heavy, sultry, sensual banger. Feels like a standout tune among the usually hectic, maximal songs that serve a similar function.

Here’s a sickening one that’s a good example of “speaker check” or “sound check” style. So rather than a full on dance tune, sound check is meant to just test the absolute limits of the speakers and drive them through the wringer, all the way from heart attack-inducing bass to ear-shredding sirens and crow sounds. It’s almost post-music at this point, just pure sound abstracted. There's something so satisfying about hearing body-shaking bass exposed bare with the intent of destroying the speakers its coming out of, would love to hear this on a huge system.

Love these “over beat” or “over bit” style tracks, where they take a popular Bollywood or pop song and put it way down in the mix, and then just chuck another beat over the top. This one features a barrage of kicks at a casual 180 BPM with hectic drums and some confrontational film dialogues scattered throughout. Love it, and it blends really well with deconstructed club tunes if you slow it down a bit.

I just love the idea of starting the tune with a PSA. Man’s literally telling the crowd to step away from weak-hearted DJs and prepare for what he’s about to unleash. Imagine you’re in a “face to face” box competition and your opponent plays this tune, what do you even do. Instant death, concede on the spot!

Really energetic and playful sound design from DJ Subhendu. This one’s got him shouting out his town in his producer tag, plus a slamming kick pattern that sounds like a lot of UK-influenced bass music. This honestly could be just a few mutant standard deviations away from some Simo Cell tracks, it's always fun to hear similarities between tunes from completely different contexts.

This one’s just outrageous, and to us it feels like it's pushing the boundaries of the competition style. Madness, hysteria, insanity. How is this even legal?!

This is one that Nikki Nair shared with us. More like 'Lok Geet' (folk song) vibes rather than full on Dek Bass on this one, but love this for the different feel and triplet rhythm, and you can definitely see how the Dek Bass influence translates to this style here for more of a roadshow vibe, rather than full-on box competition. Although it's not from West Bengal, the feel of these types of tunes were also a huge inspiration for our EP.

Absolutely hazardous five minutes of bass and siren action from DJ Khobir. A sneak peek from our friend Rana’s forthcoming film on the Dek Bass scene. Here’s what Rana from Reproduce Artists has to say about it:

This track, and others like it, are produced by DJ Khobir, arguably as a sort of stress test for speaker cones, ear drums, and perhaps, a subconscious memory of a post partition Bengal still coming to grips with memories of a famine brokered by Churchill, failed land reforms, “communism”, capital flight, and resultant unemployment. Or perhaps, it just goes hard as shit, we all need more of this in our lives, and you'll need to watch the film about him and Dek Bass to figure out why.

Artist Unknown, field recording from a gathering of Bangla Boxes and Chongs on the banks of the river Damodar on January 1, 2025.

This one’s a field recording from our friend Lewis Khan, who also went out to West Bengal to document the scene and is going to be releasing something soon. It took them going two kilometres away from the speakers to get their mics not to clip, and you can still hear the distortion and sheer power of the speakers through this recording. The sick thing about this tune is that they’ve sampled some melodic truck sirens, which are a massive part of Indian road culture and designed to cut through traffic noise to grab other drivers’ attention. Really fun to hear that sound in the context of soundsystem music that cuts through the noise of… everything.

Baalti's new EP, 'Mela', is out now on Steel City Dance Discs. Check it out here

Gemma Ross is Mixmag's Assistant Editor, follow her on Twitter