Charanjit Singh

It’s Friday so we’re listening to something more upbeat. Today we’re listening to Charanjit Singh, an Indian composer and electronic musician from Bombay. Earlier this week DJMag published an excellent feature on Singh and his 1982 record, Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat. He was born in 1940, his parents instrument makers, and he played many different instruments growing up.¹ His versatility earned him plenty of gigs as a Bollywood session player, though by the early 1980s he’d grown bored of their formula. Around that time, the Japanese corporation released the TB-303 bass synthesizer and TR-808 drum machine. Singh was attracted to these newfangled devices as a way to pursue a new musical direction. He used them, along with the Jupiter 8 synthesizer, to make Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat, which was released in 1982 to little fanfare. Decades later, the album was rediscovered and recognized as an incredibly prescient realization of electronic dance music, especially its acid house-style use of the 303. The record was recently reissued by the label Light in the Attic. A few years before Singh passed away in 2015, he told The Guardian of the Roland and Jupiter instruments, “At home I practised with the combination and I thought ‘It sounds good – why not record it.’”