Haider Uppal & Lost Boy merge raga tradition with club rhythms on ‘1 to Oneness’

Following their previous collaboration for ‘Get Real’, Pakistani artists Haider Uppal and Lost Boy team up once again for ‘1 to Oneness’.

Out via Haider’s own label inara, it’s a three-track EP merging South Asian source material with deep house and downtempo frameworks.

‘mughal house’ kicks off the EP, pivoting on a sitar phrase from Pandit Ravi Shankar’s 1974 Raga Yaman Kalyan performance, floating over a sub-driven low end, with percussive accents accompanying.

“The original phrase is pitched +2 semitones, then re-timed and harmonically layered to fit a 4/4 house/techno framework,” says Haider.

“I’ve retained the melodic contour and microtonal inflections, but reharmonised the drone environment to shift its emotional colour, while adding percussive structures influenced by dub grooves,” he adds.

Lost Boy’s ‘Bloom’ draws from archival recordings of Mehdi Hassan, folding them into a downtempo-meets-deep-house arrangement. Fragments are processed with light delay and reverb, textured against synth pads and soft percussive clusters for an introspective listen.

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The duo agree the two tracks were “meant to be packaged together”, as the EP is rounded out by a collaborative bonus track ‘Teiseen’.

Though more stripped back, it features arpeggiated synth lines, steady kick-snare patterns, and layered percussion aimed at dancefloor play. The harmonic language remains connected to the EP’s South Asian influence, but without direct sampling.

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“‘1 to Oneness’ was never about chasing a genre,” says Haider. “We worked with different kinds of music… to create tracks that emerged as entirely new worlds.” He adds, “We’re here to build a sound that’s full of depth, with South Asian DNA at its core.”

The release is packaged with cover art from Haider’s great-grandmother’s miniature painting collection, linking the project’s visual and sonic elements through a shared cultural reference point.

Pre-order here.

Amira Waworuntu is Mixmag Asia’s Managing Editor, follow her on Instagram.

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