Could a trained Hindustani musician be the father of acid house?

B had dated the birth of electronic music in India to the early 1990s. Now, he found the timeline yanked all the way back to 1982, not just for India but for the world. That was the year a little-known Bombay session musician named Charanjit Singh released Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat (HMV / EMI India).

Singh had taken a few days off work — and a radical artistic detour — to make the album. Then he returned to providing background music to RD Burman, Laxmikant-Pyarelal and Naushad, and playing with a ghazal-singing wedding band.

For nearly three decades, the record remained as unexalted as its creator. But Singh lived to see this change, after Dutch record producer and Bollywood historian Edo Bouman (who also introduced the album to B), stumbled upon …Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat at an old records store in Mumbai, in 2002.

Bouman bought the record, played it in his hotel room, and was “blown away”, he told The Guardian in 2010, the year he reissued the album under his Bombay Connection label. The album “sounded like acid house”, and to Bouman’s shock, came five years before the first known acid house record, 1987’s Acid Tracks by the Chicago-based Phuture.

Acid house, a sub-genre of electronic dance music (EDM), gained widespread global popularity (and notoriety for its associated culture of drug use and hedonistic raves) from the late 1980s . Its sound came to be defined by three elements: the heavy use of energetic rhythms generated by an electronic drum machine; an accessible and danceable beats-per-minute framework; and the use of instruments such as the Roland TB-303 bass synthesiser.

In …Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat, Singh introduced his then-brand-new acquisitions: a Roland Jupiter-8 keyboard, Roland TR-808 electronic drum machine and the Roland TB-303 bass synthesiser that he had bought in Singapore.

Built on a racy and repetitive synthesised drum beat, the album lays out its 10 India ragas on a platform of minimal, portentously bottom-heavy grooves to create a sound that is unique, exploratory and futuristic in design. It is the first known instance of these three instruments, which would come to characterise the acid house sound, being played and recorded together.

House rules

Singh was 70 when the remastered album was released (he died five years later, in 2015). Stories written about him at the time are marked by surprise. Many of the articles seem to view him as an Oriental quirk or oddity within the narrative of acid house music’s Occidental origins. Mojo magazine calls the album “a startling piece of proto-house that predates the above records (from Chicago producers) by years.” Spin magazine refers to Singh as “an unwitting electronica pioneer”.

Nonetheless, Bouman’s limited release remains a sought-after collectible, retailing for about ₹3 lakh a piece on online marketplace Discogs.com.

Singh was, admittedly, innocent of the cult and culture of what would become acid house. In a 10-minute documentary short made in 2010 by Singh’s manager and agent Rana Ghose, the bespectacled septuagenarian walks the interviewer (a wonderstruck Samrat B) through his collection of LPs. There’s music by Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar, posters from foreign concerts he performed at, advertising an evening of “Hindi film song, Gozal and Bangoli song”, but little insight into what could have sparked …Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat other than, as he put it, “the urge to try something different”.

By 1982, disco had dug its white, heeled boots decisively into Indian pop culture via actor Mithun Chakraborty and the Bappi Lahiri-scored Bollywood megahit Disco Dancer. This came a year after the hit song Disco Deewane by Pakistani popstar Nazia Hassan and British-Indian producer Biddu. “For him, it was only disco. He had heard nothing of electronic music,” B tells Wknd.

Over numerous meetings between 2010 and 2015, Singh would tell B that he was inspired, among others, by Babla, a Gujarati artist who enthralled the diaspora in the Caribbean and North America with his disco-dandiya / chutney music in the late-1970s and early 1980s.

After the album’s reissue in 2010, Ghose organised European and American club tours for Singh. Suddenly, instead of geriatric NRI sit-down audiences looking for an evening of ghazals, the Mumbai musician was faced with psychedelicised thousands in European nightclubs. “He remained unaffected and stayed focused on his music,” Ghose says.

By B’s reckoning the epochal album was a “fluke”; other music historians have called it “an accident”, “a mistake”. Inarguably, it was the first of its kind.