Indo Warehouse

A mandap in the Coachella desert

In April 2025, the Gobi stage at Coachella stopped looking like a festival tent: a mandap turned into a DJ booth, a line of dhol players in the foreground, and a team of over forty people—bhangra and garba dancers, vocalists, percussionists—closed the circle of a sound the duo had already dubbed Indo House. Kahani and Kunal Merchant did not arrive in Indio as opening acts for a foreign genre: they were the first South Asian electronic music collective on that lineup, and the audience ended up calling the moment Indochella.

Warehouse energy, without map borders

The name was born from a Spotify playlist. In 2021, Kahani—born and raised in New York, with an ear for qawwali, Punjabi, and Bollywood—was returning from Mexican beaches where deep house spoke every language except his own. He compiled the little he could find of South Asian electronic music and titled it Indo Warehouse: warehouse energy, open territory, the subcontinent as an idea of people and not borders. Kunal Merchant, born and raised in Houston and already established in the New York scene—with works like Jai Hov Beats—arrived skeptical at the first test nights. The audience was not.

From a jazz club to Brooklyn Mirage

The first party was on February 26, 2022, in a small New York jazz club: two hundred tickets sold out for a format that still had no manual. For a year they stayed in the city and doubled their capacity. The leap to Avant Gardner—first King's Hall, then the three-thousand-person Great Hall—came before twelve months had passed. Then came the signing with United Talent Agency, tours through North America, Europe, Africa, Australia, and Asia, nights at Hï Ibiza, London's Fabric, Day Zero in Tulum, and the sold-out London Roundhouse. In Mumbai, the Dome welcomed them with thousands of people; in London, a seven-hour All Night Long allowed them to tell the story without a clock. They also performed during the Singapore Formula 1 Grand Prix and maintain a monthly program on SiriusXM's Diplo's Revolution.

A label that wants its own category

As a label, Indo Warehouse has released compilations like Year One and Year Two, has signed the duo Anvaya, and has taken the sound to Crosstown Rebels with Bombay Acid, by Kunal Merchant alongside Raja Kumari, inspired by Charanjit Singh. The pulse rarely exceeds 128 BPM: hypnotic house, melodic techno, vocals, folk percussion, and B-side melodies over a 4/4 club beat. They are pushing platforms for Indo House to exist as a category, not as a borrowed label. Today Kahani and Merchant are no longer just building a world: they place themselves at the center of the stage, with tours of dozens of cities and a catalog that treats the diaspora as architecture, not as decoration.