The Many Shades of Mantra: A Life Lived Through Drum & Bass

Mantra, AKA Indra Khera, wears many hats. She’s a D&B DJ and producer, she’s the co-founder of label Rupture LDN, she’s a mentor and co-founder of EQ50 and she runs one of the world’s most forward-thinking, inclusive, and longest-running drum & bass club nights. 

Her commitment to D&B remains unwavering because she’s just as excited by the music now as she was after her first rave back in the mid-90s. “That’s when I knew I wanted to be part of it,” she says. “But I thought it would be doing the door or something, because there were no women DJs.”

Born and raised in West London, her early exposure to music came from her mother, who’d play Leonard Cohen and Joan Baez around the house, and her father who ran a Punjabi radio station called Desi (that’s still running today).

“There was always a lot of jungle playing from my brother’s room,” she remembers. “I wasn’t immediately drawn to it as a nine-year-old, but I loved the energy of it, and it was always on pirate radio with MCs shouting over it. I remember thinking this music makes me feel crazy.”

When she was 14 she and a mate took their fake IDs to Bagley’s in Kings Cross for their first UKG rave. “It was a huge warehouse with five rooms and an arcade downstairs, probably about 3000 capacity,” Mantra says. “It had a hugely profound impact on me, I had a visceral feeling in my whole body and mind. Everything just made sense.”

That was the moment she decided she’d spend the rest of her life involved in this culture in some way or other. “After that my friends and I were out every weekend,” she says. “And when I was 15 I went to my first drum & bass rave. I wore tracksuit bottoms and trainers and I did not leave that dance floor all night. I totally lost it with no inhibitions and danced like no one was watching, ‘cos they actually weren’t, and I knew these were the kinds of spaces I wanted to be in.”

Mantra soon learnt to DJ, playing on pirate radio stations, house and squat parties, and went on to study a music production course at a tiny school in Islington. There, she met some key figures in her life: “Equinox, an incredible legendary jungle DJ, I met David my partner, and Louise Plus One who's this hero of the free party scene,” she says.

20 years ago, London’s landscape was vastly different to how it is today. She and her partner David ‘Dubz’ Henry (AKA Double O), would DJ all over the place, from free parties to squat parties to basement bars. “There were so many dive bars with licenses to 3 or 4 a.m. with shitty sound systems,” Mantra remembers. “It was low risk, and good experience to play on so many terrible set ups.” 

By 2006, Mantra was ready take her career to the next level, but couldn’t get her foot in the door of any of the clubs she wanted to play at. “There was a much stronger crew mentality then,” Mantra says. “There were a lot of label nights who had their residents, and I just really struggled to break through and get sets anywhere.”

So, Mantra and Double O launched Rupture LDN to change that. Their first night was in a club in Camden, and they venue-hopped around London for a year until they moved over to Corsica Studios where they remain today. 

“I loved the whole process,” Mantra says. “It was so exciting, getting a name, a logo, the line-up, the venue, the artwork, the flyers, the vision. All of it just made me feel so alive at a time when I was starting to feel a bit deflated.”

At the time, no one was throwing drum & bass raves at Corsica Studios. “The size was right, the space was right, the sound was right. It was exactly what we needed to make us stand out,” she says.

The ethos behind Rupture was to counteract Mantra’s experiences by being as inclusive as possible. Now, their community is expansive, with pioneers like Equinox, DJ Flight, DJ Storm, Djinn, Decibella, Paradox, Cheetah, Janaway performing alongside historical jungle MCs like Blackeye, Chickaboo, and SP:MC. They’ve done takeovers at Outlook, Glastonbury, FOLD, and fabric, and next year, they’ll celebrate twenty years of the label and club night with an astounding legacy to look back on.

Throughout the festival takeovers, worldwide tours, pop-ups, mentorships and workshops, Mantra’s been working hard on her own productions. “It’s been a slow journey,” she says. “I had children, I was working a lot, so production wasn’t always a priority.”

She’s released well over 100 tracks since the late ‘90s, with her breakthrough coming in the form of “Mindgames,” released on UVB76-003 in 2016. But she found the pressure to follow up difficult to navigate, which is why the world had to wait 7 years for her debut EP, released in 2023 on Sneaker Social Club. 

It was well worth the wait. Damaged is a four-track bass-music extravaganza, not conforming to any set of rules, instead taking elements of bass, dubstep, jungle and breaks to create her own deconstructed club sound, created without pressure of any kind. “I started to look inside instead of outside for inspiration,” she says. “I was just totally present, not trying to think of an end goal, because that puts a brick wall in front of me.”

That’s been Mantra’s creative strategy ever since. She approaches each production with total openness, with no label or direction in mind. “I lower the stakes, open my laptop and see what happens,” she says. “I need real freedom and no expectations to remove all mental barriers.”

That’s exactly the approach she took with her upcoming EP Shades of Rave, Vol. 1, her debut release on Rupture LDN, and created with her love of raving at its core. The five-track EP integrates 4x4 jungle techno, jungle, deep D&B and a spoken word poem written and recited by Mantra, dedicated to an all-night-long Ferry to the Underworld session at Corsica Studios. “Inspired by the many moods and energies of the dance floor, I wanted to express the different shades of rave I continue to love and cherish all these years on since going to my first rave at 14,” she wrote.

“The tracks that made it to this EP are all really joyous, and all came really quickly,” she says. “When you get that buzzy feeling of energy surging through you as you’re writing, those are often the best tunes.”

Coming up, Mantra will continue to spin the many plates she’s had in the air for 20+ years. She has Shades of Rave, Vol 2. in the works, 20 years of Rupture celebrations next year, she’s  currently mentoring her third year of EQ50, a community and mentorship programme that pair new womxn artists with established D&B pioneers and labels. On top of that, Rupture will be closing Stonebridge on Sunday at Glastonbury, and taking over FOLD London in June. 

And it just hasn’t got old – Mantra still sees D&B and jungle as her happy place. “Things feel upside down right now,” she says. “The world isn’t making a whole lot of sense. I think we over consume information on our phones, and when you lock it out, everything starts to regulate. Things can feel divisive, but I think that fundamentally human beings are good and caring and kind. That’s why raving is so important now more than ever – and the good raves don’t allow phones so you’re not going to see them on your timeline – and that’s the way it should be.”

Mantra's Shades Of Rave, Vol. 1 EP is out now via Rupture LDN. Buy it on Beatport.