From Folk to Popular and Back: Musical Feedback between Studio Recordings and Festival Dance-Songs in Uttarakhand, North India

Every day central Himalayan musicians travel to studios in east Delhi to record their own renditions of rural festival dance-songs. The resulting recordings, infused with studio techniques and sonic “folk” tropes, are distributed, consumed, and reinterpreted back in the mountain villages where they may reinvigorate festival dance-song performances and perhaps eventually stimulate new studio productions. This article ethnographically traces processes of musical feedback and influence between the urban recording studio and the rural festival, thereby complicating the routine dichotomization of musical life into categories of indigenous/cosmopolitan, traditional/modern, or production/consumption.