When Chicago-based beatmaker Lapgan was a boy, he sat outside a clothing store in Delhi, listening to 2Pac’s 'Me Against the World' on his Discman, while his parents were inside shopping. The street around him moved with the textures of everyday life: rickshaws, heat, fabric stalls, and the smell of food. “The juxtaposition of 2Pac’s music with the scenes, sights and smells of Delhi became a vivid memory that stuck in my mind,” he recalls. In that moment, two worlds collided: one shaped by American hip-hop, the other by the layered cultural inheritance of South Asia.
“That kinda fits the first-gen trope of growing up between two worlds, but I think it's a trope for a reason,” he reflects. “Because that is really how it did feel growing up.” The experience of listening to 2Pac in Delhi may have felt incidental at the time, but in retrospect, it became a formative bridge — one that linked sound to memory, place, and cultural consciousness. “Maybe that experience with 2Pac in India was the genesis moment for the music I'm making now, but I didn't know it at the time. It was through hip hop that I eventually made the connection between music and history and politics.”
That connection now defines his practice. Lapgan’s work draws from archives of South Asian sound — Bollywood and Lollywood, Tamil film music, religious chants, and folk instrumentation and assembles them through the lens of beatmaking. But more than just sampling, his work is a negotiation between preservation and recontextualisation.
“Some songs have an emotional depth or a message that I instinctively feel I need to preserve. But other times I try to intentionally subvert the original context … usually in a mission to fit the greater story or theme that I'm trying to convey.”Lapgan
The approach shifts depending on the project. 'Duniya Kya Hai', released in 2021, leaned into nostalgia. It was a sonic memoryscape that drew from both sounds of the India-Pakistan border, with a speculative shared past untethered from the violence of Partition. “I really tried to blend source material from both sides of the border to create an imaginary past — where cultural offerings from both sides of the India-Pakistan border were openly shared.” It’s a subtle but pointed gesture, reframing national soundscapes through the politics of longing and what might have been.
By contrast, his 2023 release, 'History', takes a more inquisitive approach. Lapgan tried not to lean on nostalgia as much with that record, but rather approach the material world through the lens of a student, while "learning about different instruments, languages, and sounds from across the South Asian subcontinent". "That was a cool process for me because I wanted to make the album an imagined history class for listeners, and was learning about the subcontinent’s history myself at the same time," he explains.
It’s this instinct to decode history through sound that continues to shape Lapgan’s evolving collaborations, pushing his work beyond the personal and into a broader cultural dialogue. For example, the soundtrack he has composed for Kartik Research’s upcoming runway presentation at Paris Fashion Week was a natural collaboration given the brand’s emphasis on Indian modernism and personal style rooted in cultural history.
“There’s definitely an analogue between Kartik’s clothing and sample-based hip hop,” he notes. “His research process is akin to crate digging. He's traveling around India, working with artisans from different regions, observing fashion in different regions, repurposing old material — like his kantha blanket jackets, or taking inspiration from designs from the past and recontextualising them with his own spin.” Lapgan sees the music and clothing as structurally linked.
“The 'ghuma' denim trouser, for example, is made with upcycled vintage denim, which on the repatterning feels like chopped up drum samples. The hand embroidered beaded belt and chain are like layers of Indian percussion or like a flute melody.”Lapgan
With that parallel in mind, the artist approached the soundtrack instinctively, drawing on sample-based techniques while weaving in references to modern composers. “I basically wanted to make something that sounds authentic and cool, paying tribute to the past but also creating something new — a type of soundtrack that fits Kartik’s aesthetic and brand, but also something that’s never been played on a Paris Fashion Week runway before.”
In all of this, Lapgan’s work resists the allure of nostalgia as a purely aesthetic gesture. Instead, it interrogates the past — its fractures, its blind spots, and its possibilities — and insists on reassembly as an active, intentional practice. What emerges through his music is but a form of inquiry; a means to understand how we inherit culture and what it means to make something personal from that inheritance.
Follow Lapgan here.
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