Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat (1982, reissued 2010)
10 tracks, 50 minutes
Spotify (not in the UK though) · YouTube · Boomkat
Acid house is often mentioned in relation to this album – the music contained within shares lots of similarities to acid house, not least the use of the TR-808 and TB-303 that provide the linchpin of the sound. It just so happens that Charanjit Singh’s music predated acid house by five years – this has led some hysterical commentators to suggest that this record shows ‘the invention’ of acid house and rewrites the history books, but really, this is something completely different.
I mean, he says it right there in the title: this is ten ragas - Indian classic melodic modes and associated performance rules - played to a disco beat. Disco was big in Bollywood at the time, and Charanjit had been messing around with his fancy synthesisers for long enough to actually use them together convincingly. Instead of record a straight-up disco album, he lugged his synths to the studio, programmed in his ragas and jammed for five minutes each. The subsequent record did not sell well, and Charanjit carried on his way as a reasonably successful session musician, sometimes-composer and hobbyist synth-wrangler. And that’s how it stayed until the record was ‘rediscovered’ by some Dutch blokes in the 2000s and eventually reissued to huge acclaim in 2010, allowing Charanjit to tour the world until his death in 2015.
It’s a fun story, and quite a familiar one that seems to come around every few years with different artists, but the main draw of this one for me is literally just how it sounds. We’ve already established that I love loops and repetition, and they make the basis of this record. Add on the retro synths playing in all these interesting scales and patterns and it’s intoxicating. Okay, it does sound quite a bit like acid house, but if history had pinged off in a different direction at some point. This is one of those ones that will stick in your head; not necessarily the melodies themselves, but the vibes it creates, with your brain filling in the blanks and improvising to itself for hours.
In the end, it does have a very filmic quality to it, and I would love to see a retro technofuture cyberpunk sort of thing with this as the soundtrack. An Indian Akira, something like that. In fact, now I just want to see that.
(I have to dedicate this one to Stephen, astral voyager and gonest cat as he is, for hipping me to this one in the first place – cheers!)
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