High in the foothills of the Himalayas there’s a monastery, and it was in the attic of said monastery that Tarun Nayar found himself a few years ago. He was praying, but not to any of the many and varied gods of the Tibetan Buddhist faith. Instead, he was praying that the sonic experiment he was conducting would work, for he was attempting to do something that had never been done—fuse electronic dance music with the ancient sounds of Bhutan.

First, though, he had to convince the young musicians of the mountain kingdom’s sole professional performing troupe, the Tashi Nencha Company, to do something they’d never done before: record solo, to the mechanical pulse of a synthesized beat, instead of as a living, breathing ensemble.

“It was such a trip for me to explain to them how the recording process worked, because all of a sudden it seemed so unnatural,” says the affable producer, percussionist, and DJ, reached at his Vancouver home. “I wanted to sit each one of them down, independently of all the others, and record just them to this artificial click track.

“The reason you want to do this in modern electronic-recording techniques is that you want everything to be locked into a grid so you can go in and alter things afterwards,” he adds. “If it’s not, it’s very hard to do anything with it afterwards. So these poor kids—most of them were in their late teens or early 20s—had to sit there and learn how to play to this click, and it was so hard for them, because they just wanted to let the music do what it was supposed to do, which was take them through a very organic trip through their material. Instead, they had this dude sitting there with a microphone, telling them they had to pay attention to this really annoying sound in their ears.”

He laughs, knowing that the process would indeed seem strange to an ethnomusicologist, a jazz performer—or, for that matter, to a young Bhutanese musician who’d grown up on pristine mountain air and cups of strong, yak butter–laced tea. But he persevered—and he’s not the only one who’s glad he did, because “Kezang La”, the resulting piece of music, is one of the highlights of his new album, 22° of Beatitude.

A haunting combination of the Tashi Nencha troupe’s stately spirituality with an understated electronic backdrop and funky drums, that track is a stellar example of cross-cultural fusion. But it’s also emblematic of how Nayar’s mind works. For the popular local band Delhi 2 Dublin’s tabla player and programmer, music is all about integrating different cultural strands—and in particular the unusually diverse threads that make up his own multicultural being.

“One of the things that I’ve realized more deeply as I’ve gotten a little bit older is that everything I do is to some degree either an attempt to explore or to sew together the cultural split that is my identity,” he explains, adding that his mother is a fifth-generation Canadian of mixed Irish and Scottish heritage, while his dad is a relatively recent immigrant from the Punjab.

“When you’re a kid,” he continues, “I don’t think it’s as obvious, the factors that play into who you are and what you do. But I realized that, especially when it comes to music, everything that I do is about bringing the worlds and cultures together. And if it’s not doing that, then I immediately lose interest. I can’t just sit down and write a straight-up drum ’n’ bass track; I have no interest. For me, it doesn’t express anything about myself, or it doesn’t express anything about my reality. But as soon as there’s some beautiful Indian classical melody running through it, then it’s me; then I immediately relate to it, and I can throw myself into it.”

Nayar contends that only those from a similarly mixed cultural background can fully understand “what it means to be so fragmented and constantly looking for some kind of resolution”. It’s possible, though, that he underestimates both the increasingly cosmopolitan nature of life in general and his own skills as a beatmaker and composer. With adept cameos from sarod master Aditya Verma, guzheng player Chris Suen, and flutist Neelamjit Dhillon, among others, sitting atop rhythms that mix the contemplative with the club-ready, 22° of Beatitude is an album that should have near-universal appeal—and it might sound even better when Nayar presents it in performance.

“Because the album is a little bit more introverted—it’s not all, like, ‘Throw your hands in the air and dance’—I knew I needed a really strong live component,” he says of his upcoming tour, which kicks off in Nelson before heading to Vancouver Island, Vancouver, and points east. With that in mind, the globe-trotting producer has enlisted VJ Electrabelle to help assemble multiscreen visuals based on his own travel footage, while on the musical level he’ll be joined by DJs Nils and Lady Ra, the glitch-hop duo B.P.M., New York–based drummer and percussionist Dave Sharma, and Delhi 2 Dublin violinist Jaron Freeman-Fox. Contemplative moments aside, it sounds like a party to me.