Charanjit Singh: The Accidental Godfather of Acid House?
by Daniel Finn
I recently started looking into Indian dance music from the 1970s and 80s when I came across Charanjit Singh.
I found a video about him made by his friend Rana Ghose, who filmed a short documentary about Singh and his music.
One of the descriptions used in the video is “Godfather of Acid House”, which immediately made me want to find out where that came from.
Singh had already spent years working in the Indian film industry as a session musician and bandleader. He worked with some of the major composers and singers of the period and became interested in the new electronic instruments appearing in studios during the 1970s and early 80s.
In 1982, he recorded Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat.
The concept was straightforward. Singh took ten Hindustani ragas and arranged them around electronic drums, synthesizers and bass. He used a Roland TR-808 drum machine, a Roland Jupiter-8 synthesizer and a Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer.
It sounds completely different from the Bollywood disco records I had been listening to.
The melodies follow Indian classical structures, but underneath them you get these repetitive electronic rhythms and the distinctive sound of the TB-303. The tracks are stripped back and hypnotic, with Singh letting the machines carry much of the rhythm while the raga melodies move over the top.
The acid house connection comes from the equipment and the sound rather than Singh deliberately making acid house.
Phuture's “Acid Tracks”, one of the records closely associated with the emergence of Chicago acid house, came around five years later. The TB-303 became central to that sound, which is why Singh's album was eventually pulled into the acid house story.
Calling him the “Godfather of Acid House” feels like a bit of a stretch to me. He wasn't making acid house, and there is no evidence he was trying to create the sound later associated with Chicago. The comparison comes from what he happened to do with the same technology years earlier.
The album was largely overlooked when it was released. In 2002, Dutch record collector Edo Bouman found a copy in a Delhi record shop. He tracked Singh down in Mumbai and eventually reissued the album in 2010 through his Bombay Connection label.
I can understand why collectors became so fascinated with it. The tracks are repetitive without feeling empty. The electronic rhythm stays locked in while the raga melodies give each track its own character. There is something quite hypnotic about the whole record.