Tarun 'Tspoon' is a Vancouver based DJ/producer obsessed with fusing Asian music and electronica. He tours the world with his band Delhi 2 Dublin, and is constantly crate digging for fresh sounds - from second hand bazaars in Mumbai to the streets of Shibuya in Tokyo. He sees a trend around the world in the creation of a genre of music that is essentially genre-less. A music that blends cultures, words, beats and bass. From Angolan Kuduro to Punjabi Bhangra to Jamaican Dancehall to UK bass music, this music is breaking boundaries and bringing people together.
Tarun is also a founding member of Vancouver's Beats Without Borders collective and has shared the stage with everyone from De La Soul to Cheb i Sabbah. His tracks and mashups get play on the CBC, BBC and college stations worldwide. In May 2010 he blended Akon's 'Beautiful' with UK producer Swami's 'Sugarless' in a mashup that was eventually sanctioned by both artists' management teams and received heavy airplay in the UK. He recently scored 'BAS! Beyond The Red Light', a documentary on the lives of women in one of Mumbai's red light districts. Together with partner Umar Akbar he also runs the cutting edge global electronica label and blog Chaiwalla's Boombox.
Tarun was initiated into the art of tabla and the Indian Classical music traditon by his guru, Dr. Narendra Verma, when he was 7. As a youth he often struggled to bridge his love for Indian music with the reality of growing up in the sometimes narrow-minded suburbs of Montreal. During the cold winter months he could often be found sitting in front of the radio taping his favourite college radio shows - a window to a much wider world. The door that had been opened by his education in Indian Classical music led to a curiosity about many other musical styles from world to ska to metal. When he discovered the UK-based music of Talvin Singh and Nitin Sawhney in his late teens, deftly fusing Indian Classical music with electronica, hip-hop and r+b, he was hooked. He began to see ways in which he could bridge his musical background with the prevalent musical culture around him. Upon moving to Vancouver in his early 20's, he immersed himself into the city's underground electronic music scene. He began collaborating with various DJs and performance artists, and through these collaborations began DJing himself. A few years later, he joined up with 3 like-minded DJs and began hosting club nights dedicated to global electronica. Over the last 6 years, Beats Without Borders has hosted some of the biggest names in the genre, such as Beats Antique, Cheb i Sabbah, Adham Shaikh, and Gaudi.
It was through a St. Patrick's Day collaboration at a Beats Without Borders party that Delhi 2 Dublin was born. Intended as a one-time jam session between Celtic and Indian musicians, the act was so successful that more bookings ensued, and Tarun found himself spending more and more time on the road with the Delhi 2 Dublin crew. Eventually things got so busy he had to quit his day job (a computer geek at the Genome Sciences Centre). To date, Delhi 2 Dublin has traveled around the world and played many of the major Canadian and West-Coast US festivals, billing with everyone from K'naan to Feist. Tarun produced both full-length Delhi 2 Dublin albums, both of which placed in the top 3 on the Canadian world music charts, and both of which are still regularly on iTunes Canada's top 10 world music albums.
For Tarun, 'Journeys' is his most personal work to date. Representing over 10 years of work (some tracks date back to his earliest attempts to write electronic music!) and recording sessions with artists all over the globe, the project moves from temples in Bhutan, to street corners in Tokyo and even to an intimate conversation between the artist and his grandmother. It was a chance for him to break out of the dancefloor-driven needs of many of his other projects and write music just for the sake of writing it. Tarun stresses that this project is not based on sample libraries and sampled beats - with very few exceptions all the sounds and artists on the album were recoded by him over the last 10 years. To further relate the stories behind the music, Tarun is working with designer Josli Rockafella and VJ Suez 'Electrabelle' to bring together archival photos, videos and other materials relating to each track on the album into a dynamic visual experience that will be performed using projectors and screens at the live shows, as well as in the CD artwork and online materials.