So then! This is a fairly legendary record in the world of crate digging. It goes for eye-watering amounts on Discogs, so a re-issue is very welcome. It’s absolutely a weird record that everyone should hear. The reason people usually pick up on it is because it bears a resemblance to acid house.
What’s very familiar are the timbres of the keyboards, the sound of the kick and snare, the shuffle of the hi-hat. Timbre is super important to a lot of dance traditions. Arguably the main substantive difference between techno and house is that the latter uses handclaps while the former uses snares (both synthesised early on, both from a limited set of gear). There’s a world in those timbres. So it’s entirely predictable that an dance afficionado would hear this as proto-acid. Those are definitely, timbrally, acid synths.
I guess it’s funny as well that my main marker for differentiating Hindustani and Carnatic music is the timbre of drums — Hindustani uses tabla, Carnatic uses mridangam. This is not an authentic differentiation and use should feel bad for using it, even as a rule of thumb. There’s something in the music theory there that a) there’s loads of ways of drawing boundaries around genres and b) different people will have different ideas of the concrete-ness of those boundaries. Also c) I’m probably wrong.
Now the difference between this and traditional performances also is that this starts off at quite a pace; typically you’ve got a few movements of back and forth between various tempi (or apparent tempi) in raga to notice how the notes are transitioning. The alap (the opening bit, before the tabla come in) tends to crawl up and down a scale carefully, showing the difference between going from a-b via a bend or a slide — and my understanding is that there’s a lot more meends (note transitions) in Hindustani music than in Western classical accidentals.
The point of saying that is that this record does a lot that’s subtle — note transitions through a scale are presumably improvised and non-homogeneous; where a typical acid record would use its melody as a sample, here the fixed element is the rhythm but the extemporised element is the lead keyboard. Presumably this is very obvious to Indian audiences — these are performances of ragas and the playing is judged on how deftly Charanjit Singh‘s traversing a raga. Oddly a lot of the (what I know as) mordents — uppy-downy decorations on a note — remind me of the way that Ustad Noor Bakhsh turns up and down a note. Also worth saying that there’s a lot in this that’s monotonous (as in, the same base note) which is true of Ustad Bakhsh also.This is a great record. I imagine time constraints mean that this is a delightful pocket-sized rendition of ragas. Sometimes these things can seem chintzy — rendering ‘real’ music with (at the time) new-fangled synths — but Singh does a great job of weaving compelling paths through these ragas in a fraction of the time. I’d love a sequel which is given the more typical length of ragas, but I’ll take this meanwhile. The more I listen the more the veneer of acid drips away also.
I would say also that, as a historical document, this is another slice of the pie of the wonderful stuff that can be done with ’80s synths. I don’t want to stop acid heads from listening to it by any means. These restricted melodies (per se) show us another direction that synth music still could take and that, friends, is worth your time and attention.-Kev Nickells-
