VMP Rising: Lapgan

The history of Indian music in hip-hop goes back decades. You can plot a sonic timeline from DJ Quik’s bouncing sitar strut on Suga Free’s “Why U Bullshittin’?” (1997) to Timbaland’s string of string-filled 2000s hits and the dusty Bollywood thump that Madlib lent to Yasiin Bey for 2009’s “Auditorium” (see also: Madlib’s Beat Konducta in India). In 2012, Heems (formerly of Das Racist) and producer Mike Finito took sampling Indian music to gritty and zany new heights with Nehru Jackets. But finding the next track or album to include on this “Indian music in hip-hop” timeline was elusive for years after. Until now.

Lapgan has dug deep and wide on projects like Duniya Kya Hai (2021) and History (2023), reverently mining the sounds of the Indian subcontinent and recontextualizing them as progressive, deeply personal beat music. Born of emotional instinct and impassioned scholarship, the Indian-American producer’s beats flip fragments of Bollywood, Lollywood, and Kollywood film scores alongside Bengali religious songs and Marathi chants into cinematic, layered beats. They brim with sweeping strings, poignant vocal snippets, and knocking drums calibrated to shake Churchill’s corpse. Listen and you’re transported from bustling, ornamented bazaars (“Mughal Shit”) and towering temples shaded by bodhi trees (“Under the Bodhi Tree”) to densely packed venues where beat music devotees nod to the South Asian samples that Lapgan has given new life, drums, and depth.

“I remember the first time I made a beat with an Indian sample and went to my friend’s house to play it for them. That was a special moment for me,” Lapgan reminisces over Zoom on a bright Saturday afternoon in late August, sunlight shining through the window of his home studio in Chicago. “With samples, I go off gut instinct and feel. I’m trying to take an emotion and really amplify it, extending a moment that makes you feel deeply.”

Recently, several artistic-minded members of the South Asian diaspora have connected with Lapgan’s music. Kartik Kumra, the founder of the artisanal fashion brand Kartik Research, commissioned Lapgan to score his 2024 Paris Fashion Week show. Heems released History on his label (Veena) and tapped Lapgan to produce the entirety of 2024’s LAFANDAR. With an expanded vinyl reissue of History due out on Vinyl Me, Please, a growing number of fans, and an expanding circle of friends and collaborators, Lapgan has developed a newfound confidence in his music.

“Building that self-confidence has been a long process to me, and I’m kind of at the point where doing anything [besides making music] doesn’t make sense in my time on earth.”

Born Gaurav Nagpal, Lapgan (Nagpal backward) was raised in a Chicago suburb where his family found community among other South Asian immigrants. Like many first-generation Americans, he “grew up in two different worlds.” One at home, another in school. His parents spoke a fluid hybrid of Hindi and Punjabi and screened Bollywood classics while classmates talked MTV and the latest box office blockbusters. Lapgan appreciated both worlds and fondly recalls the annual visits to Delhi, where he and his younger sister kicked it with cousins, absorbed family stories, and savored his grandmother’s aloo paratha.

A devoted student in the classroom, Lapgan divided his extracurricular hours between piano lessons and the basketball court. His 6’3” frame landed him on the varsity basketball team in high school, where he often wandered the halls blasting The Mars Volta and Radiohead from his Discman. Though he listened to Nas and A Tribe Called Quest in college, Lapgan fell in love with hip-hop via the Los Angeles beat scene, the community responsible for exporting speaker-blowing cosmic fusions of hip-hop and electronic music from producers like Flying Lotus, TOKiMONSTA, and the late Ras G.

“The music spoke to me, and the way that the artists were so committed to the art form was super inspiring,” he says. “I was on my own making beats, but it felt like I was part of a community.”

After college, disillusioned with working 12-hour days in the business world, Lapgan taught himself to make beats via YouTube videos. It took time to find his sound, but everything clicked when he sampled his first Indian record. Lapgan merged his beat scene influences with Indian samples on 2019’s Badmaash, then refined his sound and approach on Duniya Kya Hai (2021), an aural meditation on geopolitics and the bloody, traumatic legacy of the 1947 partition of India.

“I’ve always been interested in partition because it’s a formative moment for a lot of Indian and Pakistani people. Our parents and grandparents are probably still dealing with PTSD from that. I was like, ‘We used to live together peacefully.’ Then partition happened — the most violent migration in the history of humanity. That was the thesis behind Duniya Kya Hai.”

Fittingly, the roots of History were planted on a family trip to India. While there, Lapgan met prodigious record collector and scholar Nishant Mittal, who runs the Instagram account Digging in India. Mittal provided some of the obscure samples Lapgan flipped on History to create what he describes as the beat music equivalent of an “imagined history.”

“I was thinking about my high school education and how Churchill was painted as the hero of WWII, with no mention of what he did in India and Africa. That was the impetus,” Lapgan says of History. “I wanted the album to be a textbook. If you’re reading the tracklist, it should read like a table of contents. The track titles are guides for where the music can take you.”

Every track on History transported Heems, who heard the album via Lapgan’s manager and didn’t think twice about releasing it on Veena. Soon after, Heems hit Lapgan for the beats that would comprise the supremely rapped LAFANDAR. Shadowboxing with Shiva, flexing passport stamps and fine dining in clever and intricate lines — Heems sounds reinvigorated on his first album in eight years, ready to spar with mixtape-era Wayne. Perhaps that’s because Lapgan provided the sounds Heems had sought for years.

“Man, I ran around the scene asking for beats with Indian samples for ages,” Heems says. “[On] Nehru Jackets, I came close with Mike, but it was very much in his style with a big nod to El-P’s production. Gaurav — he got it.”

Lapgan hasn’t stopped in the wake of LAFANDAR. To accompany VMP’s History reissue, he’s releasing a History remix EP featuring beats from a cast of rising producers, including Sid Vashi, Kartik Sudhera, EXCISE DEPT, and Spectacular Diagnostics. He also recorded an album with the South Asian San Francisco duo Baalti, one where he moves outside of hip-hop and dips into club and ambient music. No matter the genre, though, Lapgan’s still exploring the history of Indian music.

“Sometimes I’m like, ‘Maybe I should try sampling other stuff,’ and I do, but there’s so much different music in India from different regions. There’s still so much more to discover.”