Transglobal Underground has a flexible membership which makes for a many artistic influences and blends. Every genre of music is open for reinterpretation in this multicultural mixing pot. 

BY JACK ABOK

Transglobal Underground's blend of bhangra, trance, rap, hip hop, and dub is perfect fusion! However, while the music is easy enough to identify, the liberal use of pseudonyms makes it nearly impossible to know who's in the band or what they play at any given time.

"We don't know!" said keyboardist and band leader Tim Whelan in a recent interview. "There aren't any membership cards. Currently there are six, although there's a pool of eight. Or maybe nine. And there were four people in the last photo session," he said.

Transglobal Underground's "Moonshout and Devils and Demons," a two- disc journey into the five or so albums and countless singles they've put out since the early 90s, is a great starting point for getting into the band's hypnotic beats and sounds based around Nation Records. The London label was created specifically to fuse western dance music with Arabic, Asian, and African music, then more a dream than a reality.

"Anyone who doesn't go away is welcome to stay," Whelan said of the group. "If it feels good to them that's because they belong there. There is no attempt at cultural representation at all. It's worth noting, that most of the current bunch were born in London, whatever their background. London and what goes on there has always been the base of what TGU does, even if we move away from time to time," he said.

"What informs what we do is the musical background of the people involved. To give an easy example, most of the early team at Nation were in similar states of disenchantment with their musical backgrounds. But these backgrounds were extremely varied e.g. DJ culture, bhangra, Oriental music, rock, Indian classical music," Whelan added.

Transglobal Underground's lineup has included gifted sitar and bass player, Sheema, and latest addition Krupa Pattni who are both Asian; Whelan is English, as is Hamid Man Tu. Meanwhile conga player and vocalist T.U.U.P (the unprecedented unorthodox preacher) is Caribbean, vocalist Doreen Thobekile is African, and former vocalist/ belly dancer Natacha Atlas is from the Middle East.

The group has toured all over, playing clubs and festivals. "A lot of artists connected with Nation more than 10 years ago; Asian Dub Foundation, Natacha Atlas, along with TGU, gained a lot of success in Central Europe in the late 90s," Whelan said. "We get looked at in different ways in different places, so it's hard for us to define a typically European audience," he said.

Always fluid, Hamid Man Tu and Whelan have a side project called UNITE (urban native integrated traditions of Europe) whose debut album "A Gathering of Strangers" dropped May 17. The record is "a collection of songs of exile with members of TGU and others, swapping well known folk songs and ideas, remixing and adding to them. A song like ‘Van Dieman's land' from the English Isles about transportation to Australia, for example, might have an extra Mandinka verse added to it.

So, is Transglobal Underground still RELEVANT? "Obviously one of the things that was important about TGU in the early days was the excitement of the possibilities of new technology and mixing of styles that went on with us and with Nation and that can only happen once. I think the fact that we're still here, still working and surviving has its own relevance," Whelan said.

Night Life