The South Asian diaspora witnessed a wave of musical innovation in the early 1980s, producing a number of records that would go on to earn landmark status. In Calgary, recent college graduate Rupa Sen was visiting her brother when composer Aashish Khan heard her singing and asked her to provide vocals for what would become Disco Jazz, a frenzied disco-rock-funk record that would eventually gain a following via YouTube’s suggested videos feature in the mid-2010s. In Southhall, 22-year-old Kuljit Bhamra was using the first Roland synthesizer created and a CR-8000 drum machine to make disco and funk beats. His mother, Mohinder Kaur Bhamra, sang Punjabi folk melodies over them, and the first British Asian dance album, Punjabi Disco, was born. Back in India, Charanjit Singh had just discovered the newly released Roland TB-303 bass synth. He fused it with the sounds of the Roland TR-808 drum machine and the Roland Jupiter-8 synthesizer to craft Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat, a record whose undulating frequencies uncannily anticipated the sound of acid house, which Chicago trio Phuture would codify with 1987’s “Acid Tracks.”
A Visionary Fusion of Raga and Rhythm
Blockbuster Indian films like 1980’s Qurbani and 1982’s Disco Dancer, as well as Nazia Hassan’s 1981 solo record Disco Deewane, had brought American disco to the subcontinent’s musical mainstream. The music was slinky, glamorous, and dripping in delicious campiness. But the works of Sen, Bhamra, and Singh were different: more expansive, more exploratory, less chorus-driven, and stranger—so much so that they were overlooked at the time, only gaining recognition decades later.
Since the 1960s, Singh had been working as a successful session musician who played everything from steel guitar to synthesizer to electric violin, and he contributed to numerous songs that transformed Bollywood music. He is responsible for the droning Farfisa Transicord notes in singer Asha Bhosle and composer RD Burman’s “Dum Maro Dum,” the track that brought psychedelia to Bollywood. He also played synth and bass on Laxmikant–Pyarelal’s iconic soundtrack for the film Bobby, among dozens of other popular collaborations. He credits his work with Burman for introducing him to the bass guitar, which Burman brought to Indian film music. They had a symbiotic relationship: Burman has said that he relied on Singh to introduce modern sounds into his compositions. Singh’s work allowed him to travel, and on a trip to Singapore he got hold of the new Roland instruments. He had the idea to “play all the Indian ragas… give the beat a disco beat—and turn off the tabla,” and thus was born Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat.
Transcendent Soundscapes
Fusing the melodic and harmonic structure of classic Indian ragas with the sheen of synthesized sound, the album transmits a sense of unbridled joy in discovery. The songs, which he recorded over the course of just two days, twist and elongate, cascade and flutter, totally unencumbered as they iterate and snowball into transcendent, jubilant weirdness.
“Kalawati” begins with a droning tone that presents as meditative for just a moment until an arpeggiated scale and stuttering drum beat up the ante. When the next elongated synth note emerges, it sounds strident, dizzying, and fluid, like a swarm of bumblebees stuck in a glass jar. “Megh Malhar” is set in a raga associated with the monsoon, and it evokes both the unease of a cloud-littered sky and the thrilling potential of the moments before a storm, the sense that anything could happen next. The gentle drumbeat provides a scaffolding upon which the melody can fully unfurl, at times driven by a synth note twisting like a snake, other times by keys as bright as sequins in the light.
The record’s quirks may remind you of familiar idiosyncratic impulses: the way words take on surreal new meanings when repeated out loud in solitude; dreams of flight and transmogrification. Ten Ragas is the sound of an artist inventing a world for himself, a process that will be compelling to anyone who has wondered how far they can stretch the elements of their reality and still find their way home.
A Legacy Reclaimed
In 2002, crate-digger Edo Bouman rediscovered the record in Delhi, and in 2010, he reissued it via his label Bombay Connection. A new edition from Light in the Attic features remastered audio and an expanded booklet, with new liner notes from Singh’s grandchildren and Discostan’s Arshia Fatima Haq and Jeremy Loudenback, among others. Fans were so impressed with the music—and stunned by its resemblance to acid house—that some wondered if someone else, maybe British prankster Aphex Twin, had actually made the album. It’s a frustrating assumption, one that insinuates that this kind of fearless, pioneering electronic music had to be the work of a white British musician, rather than that of an Indian man that journalists described as humble and reserved—as if white artists in the West have a monopoly on qualities as innately human as curiosity or playfulness.
In fact, Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat is an artifact of a distinct moment in South Asian musical history, when a cadre of musicians on the subcontinent and the diaspora met a burgeoning disco scene and an influx of new technology with a sense of hunger. They endeavored to find out just what might happen if they pushed the disparate sounds they knew into strange and exciting new places, and created a set of records that have only resonated more strongly with the passing years.