Dialled In festival: ‘A space where brown bodies can come together and express their creativity’
Born of frustration with the lack of opportunity in the music industry, the event returns this weekend for an all-day celebration of music and culture from South Asia and the diaspora
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In the three years since Dialled In emerged as a new platform to support South Asian creativity in London, the community has flourished, “not just in the UK, but across the world”, says co-founder Dhruva Balram.
Born of a frustration with the lack of diversity in the British music industry, the first Dialled In festival began as a collaboration between music collectives No ID, Daytimers and Chalo HQ in 2021, before becoming a culture organisation in its own right.
On 7 September, Dialled In will return for its fifth all-day festival in London, bringing talent from South Asia and its global diaspora to take over six rooms at The Cause, a 3,000-capacity Docklands venue. The lineup includes DJs such as Ahadadream (a Dialled In co-founder), Arthi and Haseeb Iqbal, and what Balram describes as “some of the most forward thinking and experimental music people are going to hear” in the room curated by artist and musician Paul Purgas.
This year, Balram says they’re bringing in more international talent. Karachi Community Radio (KCR) has produced a futuristic visual campaign for the festival, and New Delhi-based community radio station Boxout.fm will have a presence on stage. There will also be live performances from Tamil-Swiss singer Priya Ragu and Indian-American rapper Heems.
“We wanted to create a space where people could gather, and brown bodies could come together and celebrate and express their creativity in whichever ways they felt was right,” says Balram. This sense of freedom is key for the artist-led collective, who describe the project as their “blank canvas” on which to create something unique each year.
The Dialled In team practises what Balram calls “ethical representation” of South Asia, ensuring that diverse programming is not a checklist exercise. “When people think of South Asia they might just think of one region, but we showcase artists from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Pakistan,” he adds. Their lineup accounts for regional differences between north India and south India, for example, taking care to factor in gender and class intersectionality. Closer to home, the team is also ramping up its long-term efforts to decentralise London as the UK’s dominant culture hub: in July the first Dialled In festival took place in Manchester.
Izzi, a DJ who volunteered on the door at the first festival before holding her own slot the following year, says Dialled In events have offered her a space to explore the South Asian part of her Burmese and Indo-Caribbean heritage. Her sets pull on different threads to unearth Caribbean sounds and draw on traditional Indian instrumentation. “I’m interested in how the new generation of producers are fusing the sounds of their heritage with the sounds that they party to,” she says.
Dialled In doesn’t just open the door for British talent; they’ve travelled to Nepal and Pakistan to nurture creatives on the ground. Working in collaboration with KCR and Cape Monze Records in Karachi, the collective was part of the team responsible for the inaugural Boiler Room broadcast from Pakistan in 2022. “Off the back of that, people have really grown their personal profiles,” recalls co-founder Provhat Rahman. One such figure is Ustad Noor Bakhsh, a Baluchi benju player in his late 70s, whose rising popularity has taken him on a 10-country European tour.
That same year, Dialled In also hosted a three-week multidisciplinary artist residency with visual artists, musicians and photographers in Kathmandu, culminating in a day festival. “It was really amazing to be creative but also break those social boundaries — we were seeing meetings between Indians and Pakistanis who had never met each other before,” adds Balram.
As a young festival, the team is constantly learning and adapting. In 2022, Dialled In apologised to Muslim members of its community as the festival fell during Ramadan. They recognised that many attendees might not feel comfortable at a music festival during a holy month, but they created space for anyone to break their fast at Iftar if they needed to.
Balram notes that they’re also very selective about the sponsors and partners they’re willing to work with. The Dialled In team is not afraid to chant “Free Palestine” at their gigs or take to the streets in support of community protest action. “If somebody isn’t aligned with us then unfortunately it’s not something that we can work towards,” Balram says.
This sense of community is an invaluable part of Dialled In and equivalent South Asian-led events. For British-Asian DJ NAINA, who has been DJing for more than a decade, it’s a space to collaborate with like-minded creatives with shared values. “This is super important. Especially if you’ve never had a community like this in your life,” she says.
September’s festival comes on the heels of Dialled In’s presence at Glastonbury’s Arrivals stage, the first space dedicated to South Asian artists and a watershed moment of recognition since the festival began in 1970. Dialled In is proof — if any was needed — that South Asian talent exists across a depth and breadth of genres and styles.
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