Digest | Stories, Sounds & Culture

Looking back into the 1940s and 1950s reveals Indigenous Australian musicians working across classical music, jazz, blues, harmony singing and some of Australia’s earliest rock and roll.

Ray Barretto moved between Afro-Cuban music, jazz, soul and funk throughout his career. His 1968 album Acid captures those sounds colliding during one of the most interesting periods in New York Latin music.

Disco reached Mexico in the late 1970s and moved through funk, soul, pop and Latin music, creating records that took the familiar disco framework in completely different directions.

A-Trak approaches Nike’s running experiment like a DJ, mixing hip-hop, electronic production, scratching and samples into a continuous workout soundtrack.

Funk, soul, jazz and rock travelled through Malaysia and Singapore during the 1960s and 1970s, feeding into a musical scene filled with heavy basslines, electric guitars, brass, organ and psychedelic sounds.

Years before acid house emerged in Chicago, Indian musician Charanjit Singh recorded an album of Hindustani ragas using a TB-303, TR-808 and Jupiter-8. Decades later, the forgotten record found a new audience.