In 1982, Charanjit Singh released ‘Synthesizing: Ten Ragas To a Disco Beat’ which is my favorite acid house album. (There are a lot of words in that sentence that don’t go together.) It was a marketplace flop from a musician & composer who otherwise had a long & successful career in the Indian 🇮🇳 music & film industries.
I love talking about flops. Learning about & talking about flops makes me feel better. It gives me hope that so many of the things considered failures or “bad” often are really just out of phase - ahead or behind the rest of the world at the time of their release or invention.
I first heard ‘Ten Ragas To a Disco Beat’ around 2013 or 2014 - 30 years after it was recorded! I completely missed its resurrection in 2010 & the world tour that followed in 2012 when Singh was in his 70’s! It’s such a bummer that I could have heard this music performed live & I wasn’t even aware it existed.
I have been meaning to write about ‘Ten Ragas To a Disco Beat’ since I heard it & heard the story about it. I did not have a blog then. Now, a much smarter & more skilled person has beaten me to the punch: YouTuber Alex Ball (whose videos I like & respect very much).
His history of this amazing recording is comprehensive. It includes interviews, a little music theory, note-for-note musical re-creations of funky bass lines on the Roland TB-303 & other period-appropriate gear along with his usual reporting rigor & humor. If this subject at all interests you, watch the video.
A little more to say…
Connection: according to Alex in the video (backed by photographic evidence), Singh early to the electronic music game. He was a user of the Farfisa Transichord accordion, an instrument in the lineage of manufacturing & design that ultimately led to the release of the Cordovox CL-10 rotating speaker cabinet.
The premise of the video - whether or not Singh “invented”, or, this album is the original source of house or acid or techno music & that therefore the guy who everyone says invented acid in Chicago in 1987 didn’t - is pretty silly. Maybe that’s what people care about. Protecting their genre? The debate? I don’t care at all about either of these things…
Personally, I think ‘Ten Ragas To a Disco Beat’ is important not because it was early or “first”, but because it represents an approach that is missing in a lot of electronic music & is, in fact, often considered anathema to it, i.e., THE ACTUAL PLAYING OF MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. For those who think actually playing instruments is not cool - you’re wrong. Simply put, most of the people who make electronic music that don’t play instruments can’t play instruments.
It is possible to make great music by blending electronic sounds with real playing: Weather Report, Louis Cole, Martin Stimming, Kneebody, Tigran Hamasyan & Kamasi Washington & many others have done it / are doing it right now. Singh’s keyboard improvisations are stunning. ‘Ten Ragas To a Disco Beat’ is an excellent example of this type of highly sophisticated music.
I have been disappointed for years that this album was not on Apple Music & have been (for years) listening to it in a YouTube playlist. I don’t know exactly when they added it but I am thrilled to report Apple Music finally has made it available. The happiest track:
I love it! Check it out. It’s corny, you may hate it. Open your mind no matter what biases you’re bringing to the table. Peace.