If you are wondering why Chennai temperature soared by several notches in the past couple of days, blame it on the hot ball of fire – Dinka. The house mix queen. The ‘electric’ Swiss artiste. The glue that fuses house and its progressive genre.
A few minutes into her show at Dublin in Park Sheraton, she goes around the set and personally makes sure everything is fine. Satisfied, she rubs her hands together and with a naughty drawl, says, “I just want Chennai to go crazy tonight.”
How could they not be? Innumerable gigs around the world, a podcast and a radio show that has crossed 50 episodes – Dinka has done it all. “Oh, but I haven’t been invited to Goa yet,” she puts up a depressed face, but soon lights up talking about her shows with DJ Aqeel, the only DJ she knows from India.
While she terms Indians a responsive lot, there is something specific that she is appreciative about in Chennai, something that would leave Chennaiites baffled. “I like the Chennai weather,” she says. Yes, you read that right. She loves anything warm and humid. “Given a chance I would love to stay in such a place permanently,” she jests.
However, her secret mantra to ‘hotness’ isn’t complete. Yoga, meditation and a lot of sports – that’s Dinka albeit the console. “I sold my car two years ago and started biking to places. This is much better, given the traffic today,” she says. She also confesses hearing a soft classical number and drinking loads of water before any show, just to keep her sane while the crowd surrenders to her music, which according to them ‘makes one forget the world.’ “Low grades, break-ups, car breakdowns just seem so trivial then,” says one of them.
“I have an ear to all kinds of sounds,” says the artiste, who admits to starting her career late.
“I don’t want to put myself in a cage by sticking to my style,” she adds.
This might raise a few eyebrows among the underground artistes who consider deviating from the progressive style and commercialisation of the same, as messing with the sanctity of the genre. Dinka, however, has no qualms about it.
“You can’t just remain underground if you got to make a living,” she snaps. She adds, “It is impossible to have a day job and do underground music. You might just fade out in five years.” In order to balance between the demand of commercial music and the preservation of the genre, the last few EPs (extended play) of Dinka guarantees a classical Dinka track and includes two other tracks that would seem like works of a creative cult. Refreshing and unique.
According to her, underground artistes entering mainstream is acceptable, as commercialisation, for her, is nothing but having more listeners.
It is natural that Beatport, the biggest online platform to buy electronic music, comes out with a list that might not stay true to the progressive house genre. She acknowledges this with ease, as she says, “You don’t pick the first 10, just because they are the first ten in the list. You pick what you like.” And, we can’t agree more.
As people start to enter, Tamara Maria Claire slowly transforms into Dinka. The artiste who thinks ‘CDs are a mess’ now makes sure that she has the USB inside her bag, which she says is herstandard accessory. She then makes a slow exit, but before that she halts to mention about her best gig in Russia.
“A huge parking lot. Around 7,000 people. Open space. The crowd just went berserk,” she fondly recalls.
With that she sets the mood. One could almost hear the beats gaining momentum, steaming up the place with ‘stabs’ of music, extinguished by the ‘cheeky’ turns, only to get hotter again, with her presence.