How Yanchan Turned the Mridangam Into a Global Hip-Hop Weapon

Yanchan Rajmohan was six years old when he first sat behind a mridangam. He didn't know it yet, but the double-headed Carnatic drum — its left face tuned low and breathing, its right face cracking like a snare — would become the most recognisable sound in a catalogue now past 12 million streams.

Two decades later, the Canadian-Tamil producer is the architect of Mrithangam Raps, the viral series that placed the sacred rhythms of South Indian classical music dead-centre in trap, drill and R&B. The premise is deceptively simple: take an instrument built for temples and concert halls, and let it trade bars with a rapper. The result sounds like nothing else.

“I'm not sampling the mridangam. I'm playing it, live, into the beat. That's the whole point — the tradition has to breathe.”

— Yanchan

Raised in Scarborough, Ontario — the dense, diasporic east end of Toronto that he reps in nearly every release — Yanchan grew up between two musical worlds. On one side, the strict discipline of Carnatic percussion, which made him the youngest person in Canada to perform a Mridangam Arangetram. On the other, the hip-hop pouring out of the city around him.

A category of one

What makes the work land isn't novelty — it's craft. Yanchan is a trained mixing engineer and vocalist as well as a drummer, and his beat tapes (The India, The Scarborough, The Vancouver) treat the mridangam not as a garnish but as the lead voice. The percussion answers the rapper; the rapper answers the percussion. Call and response, tradition and the street, captured live.

As co-owner of Emtee Music Group, a boutique label and artist-development firm, he's now focused on something bigger than a single viral moment: building infrastructure for the next generation of South Indian artists, and bridging the gap between South India and North America. Heart, passion, certainty — the mantra he repeats like a metronome.