Exploring the Dualities of Mumbai-Based Duo Psycho Baiko

Following their latest release, we sat down with the duo to chat about their approach to production, the motifs that shape their DJ sets, and their adventures in the world of audio-visual experimentation.

Born from chaos and then sharpened by the bass, there is something interesting brewing in the sonic sphere of Anay and Divya, together known as Psycho Baiko. At first glance, you might find yourself wondering, “hmm, Psycho Baiko?” And that’s precisely where the intrigue begins. Underneath the chaos and the unpredictability lies a method; a carefully considered and systematic workflow that allows the duo to move fluidly between darker, bass-driven sounds and warmer, groove-led electronic music. They embrace the contrast, which allows them to create sounds that refuse to settle into a single genre, mood or expectation.

Here’s how the organized chaos brews. The A Side is Anay aka Psycho, who dives deep into jungle, drum & bass, breaks, dubstep, UK bass, neurofunk, rave and left-field club sounds, whereas the B Side, Divya aka Baiko, explores a warmer palette of global grooves, world percussion, desert blues, downtempo, Afro house, disco and nostalgic electronic sounds.

This duality extends into their approach to production. Their debut DnB single, ‘Half My Sky,’ pairs emotional vocals with a delicious slice of syncopated drums that reveal a softer and more personal side of the duo beyond the dancefloor. The track allows emotion, melody and atmosphere to take center stage, showcasing the duo’s ability to channel their genre-fluid approach into something deeply intimate. Psycho Baiko’s creative vision also extends beyond music. Drawing from backgrounds in journalism, design and live-event innovation, the duo have developed a DIY universe where sound, visuals and audience interaction intersect. Their live A/V experience uses bespoke, glitch-coded programming to create motion-activated visuals that respond directly to the movement of the crowd, turning the dancefloor into an active part of the artwork.

With a bunch of things coming their way over the course of the next twelve months, there’s plenty brewing in the Psycho Baiko camp, from new music and evolving their sound to pushing further into their distinct DJing identities and expanding their Live A/V experiments.

With that in mind, we sat down with Anay and Divya for a chat about their latest single, how their Psycho and Baiko aliases came about, their approach to production, the organized chaos that shapes their DJ sets, and the visual world they’re building around their music. We also get into their Live A/V adventures, the ideas and technology driving them, and what the next chapter of Psycho Baiko looks like.

For anyone discovering Psycho Baiko for the first time, how would you describe the project in your own words?
PSYCHO BAIKO: Psycho Baiko is less of a music project and more of a creative practice built around questioning assumptions. At its heart, it’s an exploration of music, technology, storytelling and culture, but it’s also a quiet rebellion against many of the ideas we’ve inherited about creativity.

As independent artists, we quickly realised how expensive making electronic music can become. Professional CDJs, visual software, performance technology and production tools can make the creative world feel accessible only to those with resources. We didn’t want to accept that as the only path. Instead of constantly asking, “What’s the next piece of equipment we need to buy?” we started asking, “What can we build ourselves?”

That question gradually became the foundation of Psycho Baiko. Today, alongside creating original music, we build browser-based creative tools, interactive visuals, experiment with new performance ideas and even hand-make our own merchandise. None of it is about replacing existing technology – we’re grateful for the incredible tools that already exist. It’s about showing that creativity doesn’t have to begin with expensive gear. If someone with a laptop, a webcam and an idea feels empowered to create because of something we’ve built, then we’ve succeeded.

But the rebellion goes beyond technology. I’ve always been fascinated by culture – through music, dance, journalism, poetry and anthropology – and I’ve never been comfortable with the idea that genres come with rulebooks. If disco is supposed to be joyful, why can’t it be melancholic? If house music is expected to be glossy and euphoric, why can’t it be gothic or unsettling? Why can’t drum & bass converse with Indian memories, poetry or folk traditions? To me, genres are living cultural languages, not boxes we’re meant to stay inside.

There’s also a deeply personal layer to Psycho Baiko. I’ve always been drawn to darker sonic worlds – neurofunk, dark dubstep, industrial textures and metal – but those spaces have traditionally had relatively few women at the forefront. Women are often encouraged to be polished, pleasant, pretty or emotionally restrained. Psycho Baiko pushes back against that. I want to create space for women to be loud, abrasive, introspective, chaotic, vulnerable and powerful and to embrace every shade of themselves without feeling the need to soften their artistic voice.

Ultimately, Psycho Baiko isn’t about proving that our way is the right way. It’s about encouraging curiosity. Psycho Baiko exists to question the rules we inherit – about music, technology, gender and creativity – and then ask whether those rules need to exist at all.

How did Psycho Baiko first come together, and what was the original vision when you started?
PSYCHO BAIKO: Looking back, I don’t think Psycho Baiko began with music. It began with a question. Around ten years ago, I was sitting at Marine Drive listening to Ludovico Einaudi. I remember being completely absorbed in the music and wondering, “What if a conductor could paint sound into existence with every movement of the baton? What if the orchestra didn’t just create music, but visuals too?” I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It wasn’t just an idea for a performance, but, it was a question about how different art forms could dissolve into one another.

I knew I didn’t have the technical skills to build something like that, so I started looking for someone who did. That’s how I met Anay. Looking back now, it feels inevitable that we found each other because we were both exploring creativity from different directions.

The original vision was never to become DJs or even to build a “creative universe.” We simply wanted to create honestly and follow our curiosity wherever it led us.

The name itself is pretty distinctive. What’s the story behind “Psycho Baiko,” and what does it represent to you today?
PSYCHO BAIKO: It started as a nickname, mostly because I’m a psychologist by qualification and an absolute menace when it comes to ideas.

My brain has a habit of making connections that probably shouldn’t exist and ADHD definitely helps with that, so “Psycho Baiko” became shorthand for that chaotic curiosity.

Both of you come from different creative backgrounds. How have your experiences in music, design, journalism, filmmaking and live entertainment shaped the identity of Psycho Baiko?
PSYCHO BAIKO: I think Psycho Baiko exists because neither of us has ever seen creativity through the lens of a single discipline. I’ve always been fascinated by people, culture and storytelling. Studying psychology taught me to understand human behaviour and emotion. Learning the violin gave me a deep appreciation for orchestration and musical discipline, while dance taught me that music isn’t just something we hear but, it’s something we experience physically. Journalism gave me a front-row seat to music and culture, allowing me to document artists, movements and communities, while my work in live entertainment taught me how audiences emotionally connect with shared experiences. Poetry, in turn, taught me to find meaning in silence, metaphor and restraint.

Anay, on the other hand, is one of those rare people who naturally moves between art, technology and engineering without seeing any boundaries between them. He draws, paints, plays the guitar, creates 3D art, writes code, studied filmmaking and audio engineering, and has spent years thinking about sound, design and visual systems. Growing up in a family of architects, building things was almost a way of life. His instinct isn’t just to create something beautiful: it’s to understand how it works, take it apart and imagine how it could work differently.

We constantly challenge each other. I’ll push him towards emotion and narrative; he’ll push me towards experimentation and invention. Somewhere in that conversation, Psycho Baiko finds its identity. In many ways, Psycho Baiko is what happens when psychology meets engineering, poetry meets code, culture meets technology, and storytelling meets sound.

Your latest single, Half My Sky, feels like an important step in the evolution of Psycho Baiko. What was happening creatively when that record began to take shape?
PSYCHO BAIKO: Half My Sky happened because Anay asked me a question I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Around October last year, he said, “It’s about time you started making original music.” At first, I got excited and started thinking of ideas. I thought about making a Drum & Bass track using my Shinchan voice as a sample. I imagined collaborations between Indian classical musicians and DnB artists, songs built around dancers, all sorts of concepts. They were interesting ideas, but none of them felt like they needed to exist.

In June, after my second DJ gig at The Kibono Party, he asked me something that hit much harder: “How long are you going to keep playing other people’s records? Isn’t there something you want to say in your own voice?” I woke up the next morning with an answer. I told him, “I want to write a song about how much I miss my sister.”

We’d been living in different countries for almost three years, and that feeling had never really left me. The strange thing was, I’d never fully admitted it: not even to myself, and certainly not to her. I realised there were emotions I couldn’t quite articulate in conversation, but maybe I could through music. That’s when Half My Sky truly began.

For me, music has always been more than entertainment. It’s a way of understanding feelings that don’t always have words. I wanted our original music to come from a place of complete honesty rather than trying to impress anyone or chase a particular sound. If I was going to introduce my own artistic voice, I wanted it to begin with something that was emotionally true.

I already knew it would be Drum & Bass. One of the reasons I love the genre is that it’s emotionally limitless. People often associate it with intensity or energy, but I’ve always felt it can carry tenderness, longing, grief, hope and love just as powerfully. It became the perfect canvas for the story I wanted to tell.

At the same time, I wanted to bring in orchestral textures as a quiet nod to where my own musical journey began: with the violin and the world of orchestral music. In many ways, Half My Sky became a meeting point between my earliest musical memories and the electronic music I’ve fallen in love with over the years.

Looking back, I don’t think Half My Sky is really a song about distance. It’s a song about love that exists even when life pulls people in different directions. And I think that’s why it resonates with people. Almost everyone has someone who’s become part of their sky, even if they’re no longer standing beside them.

Can you walk us through how Half My Sky came together in the studio; from the first spark of an idea to the finished record?
PSYCHO BAIKO: Once we knew what the song needed to say, the studio became a space for translating emotion into sound.

Our process is very collaborative, but we naturally bring different things to the table. I usually begin with the emotional world of the song. I’ll hum melodies, sing fragments of vocal lines, suggest instrumentation, describe textures, collect references and talk about the feeling I’m trying to evoke. Sometimes I’ll say something completely abstract like, “This should feel like the ache of missing someone.” That’s how my brain works.
Anay then starts translating those ideas into sound. He’ll build arrangements, experiment with synthesis and sound design, shape the harmonic structure and constantly ask how we can make the emotion more tangible. The process is rarely linear: we keep passing ideas back and forth, challenging each other until the music feels emotionally honest rather than just technically impressive.
We were also very conscious about not overproducing the song. Every instrument had to earn its place.

The accompanying visual world feels just as important as the music itself. How closely were the audio and visuals developed together?
PSYCHO BAIKO: Interestingly, the final music video wasn’t planned at all. We initially imagined something much more conventional. We spoke about working with dancers and shooting a proper music video, and Anay had a few visual concepts of his own that we were exploring.

Then one day, almost by accident, I opened the browser-based visuals we’d been building and started dancing to Half My Sky in my room. I screen-recorded what was happening on my laptop, watched it back, and something clicked. I realised that no choreographer or actor could physically express what that song meant to me in quite the same way, because it came from such a personal place. The movements weren’t choreographed: they were simply my body responding to something I’d written.

That’s when we decided to keep it simple. Instead of producing a bigger music video, we let the emotion lead. What people see is essentially me interacting with visuals we’d built ourselves, and somehow that felt far more honest than anything we’d originally planned. I think that’s something we’ve learnt repeatedly while making this project: sometimes the most authentic solution isn’t the biggest one. It’s the one that feels the most honest.

One thing that really stood out to me is that Psycho Baiko has grown into something much bigger than a music project. At what point did you realise you were building an entire creative ecosystem rather than simply releasing tracks?
PSYCHO BAIKO: I don’t think there was a single moment. It happened so gradually that we almost didn’t notice it ourselves. We’d solve one creative problem and, almost instinctively, end up creating something else. We’d write a piece of music, which led us to think about visuals. The visuals made us ask whether we could build our own tools. Building those tools made us rethink performance. Performance led us to hand-making merchandise. One question simply kept leading to another. Looking back, I realise we were never actually interested in building “content.” We were building a way of creating. At some point we stopped asking, “What’s the next release?” and started asking, “What’s the next idea worth exploring?” That’s a very different mindset.
The ecosystem emerged because our curiosity refused to stay in one place. I think that’s also why we don’t see Psycho Baiko as a brand. Brands usually ask, “How do we stay consistent?” We tend to ask, “How do we stay curious?”

Your browser-based interactive visuals are a brilliant example of making technology accessible. How did that idea first come about, and what has the response been like from people experimenting with it?
PSYCHO BAIKO: The idea actually came from dance rather than technology. I have both spent years on dancefloors, and some of my favourite memories aren’t of watching DJs but of dancing for hours with complete strangers. That’s what electronic music has always been about for us. The DJ might guide the journey, but it’s the people on the dancefloor who truly bring it to life.

As a DJ, I draw an incredible amount of energy from dancers. I dance with them, I feed off their movement, and I genuinely believe they’re one of the most overlooked parts of electronic music culture. We wanted to honour that. So we started asking ourselves: What if the audience didn’t just watch the visuals? What if they became the visuals?

That’s how the browser-based visual system was born. Instead of treating visuals as something projected behind the DJ, we wanted people to interact with them directly. All you need is a browser and a webcam, and suddenly your own movement becomes part of the artwork.

In many ways, it shifts the focus back to where we think it has always belonged: to the dancefloor itself. The response has honestly been wonderful. We’ve used the visuals at parties, and the moment people realise they’re controlling them with their own bodies, something changes. They become playful. They start experimenting. Complete strangers begin dancing together. Watching that happen has been incredibly rewarding because that’s exactly what we hoped these visuals would do: encourage participation rather than passive consumption.

Ultimately, that’s what electronic music has always meant to me. Not standing on a stage above people, but becoming part of the same shared experience.

Anay has also developed browser-based sequencing and performance tools. How do projects like these influence the way you think about live electronic performance?
PSYCHO BAIKO: More than anything, they’ve changed the kinds of questions we ask.

I don’t think we’re particularly interested in building more technology for the sake of it. We’re interested in asking what role technology should actually play in artistic expression.

One idea I’ve been thinking about recently is a composition about the birth of music itself. Long before instruments, long before software and long before electronic music, we already had rhythm. We had breath, footsteps, clapping, voices, dancing, stones, wood and the sounds of the natural world. Human beings were making music long before they had technology.

That made me wonder: what if the body became the primary instrument again? What if dancers, footsteps, breath, tapping, primitive materials and human voices formed the foundation of a composition, while technology simply helped capture, transform and amplify those sounds rather than becoming the centrepiece? I think that’s where Anay and I meet philosophically. Whether he’s building browser-based sequencing tools or interactive visuals, the technology is never the destination. It’s simply another artistic medium. It should disappear into the experience rather than dominate it.

That’s also how we think about live performance. The audience shouldn’t walk away talking only about the software or the setup. They should remember how the performance made them feel, how it invited them to participate and how it created a shared experience.

Ironically, the more we experiment with technology, the more it reminds us that the most powerful instrument we’ll ever have is still the human body. Everything else is simply an extension of that.

Do you see a future where artists increasingly build bespoke tools instead of relying entirely on commercial software and hardware?
PSYCHO BAIKO: I don’t think every artist needs to become a programmer or build their own tools, and I don’t think commercial software or hardware is the enemy. We use many of those tools ourselves, and they’ve transformed music-making in incredible ways. What we do hope is that artists become more comfortable questioning the tools they’re given rather than assuming they’re the only way to create.

Every artist has a unique way of thinking. If your ideas don’t fit neatly inside existing software or performance setups, maybe that’s not a limitation, it might be an invitation to invent something new. That’s been our experience with Psycho Baiko. We never woke up saying, “Let’s build software.” We were simply trying to solve creative problems that mattered to us.

I actually think we’re entering a really exciting time where artists are becoming makers again. They aren’t just composing music: they’re designing instruments, building software, creating visual systems and inventing entirely new ways of performing. That’s a beautiful shift because it reminds us that art and invention have always gone hand in hand. More importantly, I hope we don’t lose sight of why we’re building these things.

With more original music on the horizon, where do you see Psycho Baiko evolving over the next few years?
PSYCHO BAIKO: We hope Psycho Baiko continues becoming more interdisciplinary rather than more predictable. Of course there will be more original music and that’s a huge part of the journey, but we don’t want the project to be limited to releasing singles and playing shows.

We’d love to continue building immersive live experiences where music, visuals, technology, dance and storytelling all exist as one conversation rather than separate elements. We’re also deeply interested in exploring culture through music. India has an extraordinary diversity of musical traditions, stories, languages and ways of experiencing rhythm, and we want to keep finding respectful, contemporary ways for those worlds to meet electronic music: not through fusion for the sake of it, but through genuine dialogue.

We also want Psycho Baiko to remain a space for experimentation. Some ideas might become records. Others might become visual installations, comics, essays, films, live performances or creative tools. We don’t want to decide the medium before we discover the idea.

Ultimately, what do you hope people remember most about Psycho Baiko? The music, the performances, the technology, or simply the idea that anyone can build something meaningful with the tools they have?
PSYCHO BAIKO: Honestly, I hope they remember the permission more than the project. Of course we want people to connect with the music. We hope they dance at the shows, discover something new through the visuals and find meaning in the stories we’re trying to tell. But if that’s all they remember we think we’ve only achieved part of what we set out to do.

We hope Psycho Baiko reminds people that artists don’t have to fit into neat categories. You can be a musician and a technologist. A psychologist and a DJ. A poet and a producer. A dancer and a storyteller. Some of the most exciting ideas emerge when we stop asking ourselves which box we belong in and start asking what we’re genuinely curious about.

At its heart, Psycho Baiko has always been about questioning inherited assumptions: about music, technology, culture, gender and creativity. Not because we have all the answers, but because we believe better questions often lead to better art.

If people remember us for anything, we hope it’s this: that we left the creative world a little more open than we found it. That we encouraged a few people to take risks, build something of their own and realise they never needed anyone’s permission to call themselves artists.

To us, that would be a legacy far greater than streams, followers or festival line-ups.

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