Lime Tikka, the first single from Brooklyn-based DJ-producer duo Baalti and Chicago-based producer Lapgan’s forthcoming album Threads, begins as sound and becomes a story. The track is psychedelic and propulsive, anchored by a nadhaswaram — the South Indian temple reed instrument — crashing through club production with ceremonial force. The music premiered at Kartik Research’s SS26 Paris Fashion Week runway show in June 2025, but when Mumbai-Delhi collective and directors of the track’s video, Excise Dept first heard it, they thought of Skylab: the space station that fell to Earth in 1979, scattering debris across rural India.
Baalti have spent years excavating South Asian musical forms and asking what happens when you place them in spaces their original contexts never anticipated. Their self-titled debut EP pays homage to Bengali disco and Hindustani classical, turning classics by Ustad Zakir Hussain and Rupa Biswas into lo-fi house renditions. From their sophomore release, Better together, to Mela which cannonballs into the cavernous chaos of West Bengal’s underground system clashes — each project treats the archive as living material, open to radical interpretation. Their collaboration with Lapgan on Lime Tikka pushes this methodology further.
Lime Tikka lands like Skylab did — unexpected, transformative, and impossible to ignore
The music video, written and directed by Excise Dept members Rounak Maiti and Karanjit Singh, centres on Satellite Kaur, a young girl in rural India who learns her birth coincided with a satellite crashing into her village. What unfolds is a study in methodical determination as she moves from childhood curiosity to systematic obsession — reading school textbooks on space travel, building a makeshift radio telescope from household items, and eventually constructing a larger machine with her brother’s help.
The film watches her collect what she needs: a car seat, a television, tools from her brother’s workshop whilst her peers run and play around her. Excise Dept, known for their surreal visual language that remixes archival imagery with internet-fried graphics, grounds the story in rural textures whilst letting the premise remain wonderfully absurd — a girl named after a machine, building her own machine, using lime and chilli for protection against negative energy as she prepares to launch.
The music and film operate on parallel tracks — with Baalti and Lapgan sampling and reconstructing while Satellite Kaur salvages and builds
The final sequence builds to a moment of collective belief as Satellite sits in her homemade machine, her brother beside her, their father arriving to show his support. The machine activates, the frame shakes, and then comes an ambiguous epilogue: an empty seat, a red emergency light, and her brother cleaning up the aftermath. Excise Dept leaves the question of success deliberately open because the point was never whether the young girl makes it to space — the point is that she looks at the sky and decides it was worth trying to reach.
Something fell from the sky in 1979, and something fell again when Satellite Kaur was born. Baalti and Lapgan understand that these crashes — literal and sonic — become beginnings. The nadhaswaram barges into club production the way Skylab crashed into rural India: violently, unexpectedly, opening possibilities no one can anticipate. Excise Dept makes the connection explicit, but the music is already there, building momentum from wreckage.
Lime Tikka, now streaming.
Feature Image from Lime Tikka by Baalti, Lapgaan, and Excise. Dept
