Indo Warehouse

Two tech jobs and a beach in Mexico

The idea arrived in 2020, on a Mexican beach at two in the morning, while Armaan Gupta listened to a house record and mentally layered qawwali vocals over the top of it. Gupta, raised in New York, had left a technology career during the pandemic; he began pitching the fusion to South Asian artists back home and met hesitation almost everywhere.

Kunal Merchant, raised in Houston and already working as a DJ in New York, was among the sceptics. He has said his first read of the pitch was that Gupta wanted to throw a cool brown party, and that he was not interested unless the music came first. DJing an early Indo House night in the summer of 2020 changed his mind — not because of the concept but because of what the floor did with it. Merchant was running the Jai Hov Beats project by 2021, the year the two met properly in New York.

The name came from the feeling Gupta was chasing and from the geography that preceded the border: warehouse energy, and a subcontinent that was once simply the Indo. Gupta now records as Kahani. Indo Warehouse launched formally in February 2022.

Building the room before the records

The growth was local and fast. New York shows moved from around 200 people to 400 and past 800 inside the first year, and roughly eighteen months in the collective filled Brooklyn Mirage, a 5,500-capacity room. London came next, with a sold-out double header at EartH and then Camden's Roundhouse on 7 March 2025, where Kahani and Merchant played seven hours open-to-close with the Indo artist Anvaya and no support act at all.

The pair have been deliberate about what the events are not. Their line is that they never take over a club and press play: the lighting, the visuals and the live elements are designed per show, and no two Indo Warehouse nights carry the same production. That has kept the brand closer to a promoter's touring series than to a conventional DJ booking, which is also why the lineups change city by city.

Merchant has singled out Canada as one of their strongest markets — Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal — on the grounds that the audience there is open, mature, and willing to be taken somewhere across a long set.

The catalogue, and the argument about a genre name

Indo Warehouse runs its own label, and the release schedule has been steady rather than event-driven: two compilations, "Indo Warehouse: Year One" in December 2022 and "Year Two" in May 2024, sit inside a catalogue the pair put at more than fifty records since January 2022. The most-cited single is "Bombay Acid", released on Damian Lazarus's Crosstown Rebels on 24 October 2025, credited to Merchant with vocals from Raja Kumari and built in the shadow of Charanjit Singh's 1982 record "Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat".

2026 has been a run of singles from the wider roster: "Chor" with Rashmeet Kaur on 15 May, Anvaya's "Churaya" on 31 July, "Rangeen Saza" from VIZANO, Works Of Intent and Shreya Manoj on 7 August, Blu Attic's "Out Of Reach" on 21 August, and "Activate" featuring Anvaya on 28 August. Collaborators across the catalogue include Sid Sriram, Chitralekha Sen, Red Baraat, Tech Panda and Kenzani.

Alongside the music, the founders have been lobbying Beatport and the major streaming services to recognise Indo House as a category in its own right, arguing that records like theirs currently get filed as Afro House or worse — difficult for the artists and confusing for anyone trying to find the music. The supporting infrastructure is a Spotify playlist with around 20,000 followers, a monthly show on Diplo's Revolution on SiriusXM, and a speaking slot at the International Music Summit in Ibiza. Pete Tong has asked them for submissions.

Coachella, and the doors it opened

The turn came on 11 April 2025, when Indo Warehouse closed the Gobi tent at Coachella — the first South Asian electronic collective on the festival's bill — and repeated it on 18 April. The set ran with roughly 25 performers around the two DJs: the singer Sonia, the multi-instrumentalist Kaushal, Nihal Singh on dhol, and the dance crews Raas Ruckus and Baaghi Bhangra, dressed in Rohit Bal couture cut with lotus, peacock and rose motifs. The music moved between original productions and film samples, from "Chaiyya Chaiyya" and "Shava Shava" through material in Hindi and Tamil. Esquire India's review called it reverential and rebellious at once, and described the atmosphere as hypnotic rather than triumphal.

What followed in the rest of 2025 reads as the commercial consequence. Lazarus signed them to Crosstown Rebels and booked them for Day Zero in Tulum. They debuted at Hï Ibiza, played the Formula 1 Singapore Grand Prix twice, headlined the All That Glitters Diwali ball in New York on 11 October, and ran a six-city India tour from December that included Sunburn in Mumbai. That was their second pass at India: the first, in January 2024, opened at Rockpool at W Goa on 5 January in front of more than a thousand people and reached the Dome at Mumbai's NSCI on 25 January. By the pair's own count the project has now played to more than 100,000 people across six continents.

Autumn 2026, and a stated plan to go quiet

The current run began on 18 September 2026 at Pacha in New York under a new concept called Spice Trade, with Ape Drums and KILIMANJARO as guests and a back-to-back opening set from the Bangladeshi-American artists ARINI and rajid selim. District Atlanta followed on 25 September.

Ten dates are listed and ticketed: Cermak Hall in Chicago on 2 October with Anyasa and HARJI, Celebrities in Vancouver on 3 October, Quartyard in San Diego on 9 October, Penthouse in Dubai on 17 October, then Sound in Los Angeles on 6 November, The Shop in Seattle on the 7th, Royale in Boston on the 13th, Noto in Philadelphia on the 14th, Bauhaus in Houston on the 21st, and Magazine in London on 28 November. Vancouver and San Diego are both firsts for those rooms. The collective's own site frames the run as 22 cities.

After that, the stated intention is to stop touring at this rate. A redesigned show is planned for London, Berlin, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Sydney, and Kahani has said he wants to step back, be in the studio every day, and reintroduce the project in late 2026. Whether the genre-category campaign lands before then is the open question — it is the one part of the project that does not depend on a dancefloor.