The Raag Studio
SUPERTECH ECO VILLAGE-1, J-507, near Hanuman Mandir Road, Sector 1, Bisrakh Jalalpur, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201306, India
Ajit Singh began building The Raag Studio in 2009, converting the top floor of an aging textile warehouse in Bangalore’s Basavanagudi quarter into a retreat whose bricks remember thread and whose rafters now cradle tanpuras. A narrow stair still smells faintly of indigo dye; at the fifth landing a terracotta archway opens into 1,800 square feet of floating wood, no nails, only peg-and-groove teak salvaged from dismantled river boats.
The room is tuned before a single note is struck. Wooden louvers angle to the west, letting in the 4 o’clock sun as though it were another singer, and the ceiling rises asymmetrically—four additional inches for every foot you move toward the eastern wall—so that a khayal in Yaman resonates for 2.7 seconds while a Hamsadhwani tantrakari receives a dryer, 2.1-second kiss. Two concentric circles of lime-ashr plaster on the floor mark the ideal mic positions; a discreet brass ring in the center allows anchoring a goPro or vintage Nagra. Ajit refuses digital reverb, saying “If the wooden lung can’t breathe, the raga dies,” yet he permits a tucked-away rack of API preamps and Neve EQs used only to “catch, never color” what the room already loves.
On concert evenings thirty Kartapur teak foot-rests unfold; the rest of the audience reclines on floor cushions stitched from retired sarees that retain their turmeric and marigold ghosts. An in-house rule limits tickets to forty-five listeners, preserving the sense that music is happening in a traditional baithak rather than for sale. Chai and filter coffee come from a small adjoining kitchen operated by Ajit’s mother; no food is served after 6 p.m. so that tamburas are not muted by the clash of plates.
But the deeper heartbeat of The Raag Studio is archival. A locked room, climate-kept at 18 °C, holds 4,800 hours of direct-to-tape recordings donated by veteran musicians who trust Ajit’s promise that this sound will never be compressed or cross-faded. Every month the public may request an “open archive” afternoon; the chosen tape is threaded on a Revox, the lights dimmed, and for ninety unrepeatable minutes the ghosts of Mallikarjun Mansur or Shobha Gurtu re-inhabit the rafters.
Students arrive every dawn. A scholarship called Dhruva Pad covers a year’s riaz for six vocalists and four instrumentalists selected only by a blind audition heard from behind a silk screen. These apprentices polish taans while textile workers load trucks one floor below, the low thuds absorbed by the same beams that once carried bales of cotton. Thus an eight-beat teentaal and the city’s mercantile pulse exchange breath. At nightfall the final tanpura string is muffled, lukewarm chai cups are stacked, and a lone lamp over the archive door keeps vigil until the next singer climbs the indigo stairs to feel the room breathe back.
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- Published: August 7, 2025
