Hands-on Experience: Talvin Singh

"We are seen to be heading back to a world-balance similar to that of a thousand years ago, when the initiative in human affairs belonged on Pacific coasts. Meanwhile, a process of cultural colonization-in-reverse-accumulated over the last 200 years - is challenging the dominance of Atlantic tradition" - Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium

A different kind of Orient: Leyton, East London. In Talvin Singh's tropically heated basement studio, speaker cones are straining at their moorings, vibrating under the pressure of deep bass drum and dub bassline, whiplash snare, helium vocals like a geisha from Mars (the singer turns out to live round the corner), rising over neck-prickling chord-swells. In the distance, a carpet of Ambient Hindu vocal, like morning mist drifting across the Kashmir.

And there's something else in there: follow those leads back to the source, from mixing desk through effects rack, snaking up to where they're jacked into the metal rims of a pair of tablas, clamped to a horizontal bar at chest height. Welcome to the future sound of India.

March 1994. I meet Talvin for the first time on the flight back to London from Voss Jazz Festival in Norway. The day before, I'd seen him sitting cross-legged on stage in an open-form improvisation set with Mike Maineri and Bendik Hofseth. The music was reminiscent of the kind of delicate, breathy ambience that began to breeze into ECM recordings towards the late 70s: Oregon, Codona, Old And New Dreams, crossed with Stockhausen's Telemusik. As soon as he gets home, Talvin tells me, he has to fly straight over to the States to rejoin the Bjork tour: this was just a breather for him.

You may not have seen Talvin yet, but you'll almost certainly have heard him somewhere: whether in the late 80s Indo-jazz groups that formed in the wake of the British jazz movement (Talvin still counts Courtney Pine and Cleveland Watkiss among his friends); or his RD Burman-influenced string arrangements and percussion on the Bjork albums Debut and Post. His tablas have also appeared on Future Sound Of London's Lifeforms, Little Axe's The Wolf That House Built, a recently issued Sun Ra concert recording from the Hackney Empire (about which more later), remixes for Natacha Atlas; and as well as the Bjork tour, he found time to co-ordinate 1994's Live And Eclectic festival at London's Ministry Of Sound, where he formed a group with On-U Sound players Skip McDonald and Bim Sherman; opened up for Massive Attack when they took Protection out on the road in 95; and has turned up with his tablas at clubs, raves and parties all over London and beyond: The Big Chill, Megatripolis, Whirl-Y-Gig.

Talvin has never released a record in his own name, but all that's about to change. He's been biding his time, watching the first waves of British Asian culture break on the rocks of media stereotype, niche marketing or simple English ignorance. By the end of this year, as well as playing on a new Bim Sherman LP due in May, Talvin will have launched a number of different projects instigated by himself: Anokha, not a club but a 'global village congregation', based in London but linked via an ISDN line to Bombay; The Talvin Singh Band, with live musicians, real-time sequencing and dub engineering by Adrian Sherwood; One World One Drum, a project involving around 20 different drummers and percussionists to be recorded live at Peter Gabriel's Real World complex; his own Omni label, dedicated to releasing music by his widening circle of friends and musicians in the UK and India, from classical music to Indo-dub hybrids; and Future Sound of India, perhaps the baby closest to his heart: a sonic Indian dreamscape ("Kind of an acid trip in India") constructed from the DATs he records on his regular trips East, samples from Bollywood soundtracks, contributions from invited musicians from all walks of music, and of course, those electric tablas...