Charanjit Singh’s 1982 release Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat has made quite a splash in the hipper music press, but my band’s manager in 1982 always threatened to pull the plug when we played stuff like this.
For many who consider themselves sophisticated listeners, the words “synthesizing” and “disco beat” in an album title would pretty much wrap it up in terms of whether or not they’d listen to it. And if they weren’t into Indian music, throwing the word “raga” in there would seal the deal for good. Which would be too bad in the case of Charanjit Singh’s 1982 release Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat. It’s worth a listen. Although I wouldn’t give the raves a lot of pop media blogs are giving it and say it’s history-dismantling or absolutely shock and awe inducing or that Charanjit Singh accidentally invented house music. No, to me the recording is remarkable for other reasons, primary amongst them being the fact that it exists at all. Partly because it’s electronic, partly because it was from an Indian artist in 1982, but mainly because someone took the time to record it so well, and that there was still a master to work with decades later. Although fans of acid and other techno-inspired club music would strangle me for saying this, the music on this record is remarkably unremarkable not because it’s bad in any way, but to be blunt, whenever my band’s manager in 1982 caught us pursuing this kind of repetitious multicultural noodling with our Roland synth and drum machine, he threatened to pull funding. And you could often hear music much like this coming through the studio walls when musicians of the era were stoned and jamming. You never would have thought at the time to record the stuff, and if you did, you probably would have done so on some crappy 4-track portastudio. It took a generation of drugs and clubbing for dance music to evolve to the point where this kind of machine-driven droning was actually perceived as music. I jest a little, but I’m partly serious. Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat is definitely worth a listen simply because it’s worth a listen. In terms of being ahead of its time though? It’s probably more worthy of note because of the fact that the recording made it to tape and lasted long enough for a re-release almost 30 years later than because it was prescient or eerily visionary. I’m just gonna go see if I can find those portastudio tapes now. I may have found an aftermarket for my post-punk era rejected demos .
Take a listen for yourself:
And whether you like the music or not you have to admit it’s a pretty sweet cover:
