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'I found the roots of electronica in a cupboard!': the tale of India's lost techno pioneers | Musique Non Stop

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Thursday, May 14, 2020

'I found the roots of electronica in a cupboard!': the tale of India's lost techno pioneers

In the 1960s, a group of Indian students accidentally invented minimal techno – and hoped their synths could cure disease. A new documentary unearths their story

In 2016, the British artist and musician Paul Purgas had his curiosity ignited: he had read that the electronic musician David Tudor, a close collaborator of John Cage, took a Moog synthesiser to the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, India, in 1969. This struck Purgas as odd. The machines were very new then; bulky, breakable, and a nightmare to transport. India also had no history of electronic music, to his knowledge, before Charanjit Singh’s Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat, which was released in 1982 to little fanfare but proclaimed a proto-acid house classic on its reissue in 2009.

The article he was reading showed the Moog now, ant-infested and weathered, rescued by an old student. Fired up, Purgas booked a trip to find it. He accidentally uncovered something bigger: a cache of long-forgotten recordings that had not been touched for nearly five decades. It led him to a fascinating story that he explores in a new BBC Radio 3 documentary, Electronic India. “I basically found the roots of Indian electronic music in a box in a library cupboard,” he laughs. “Tracks with titles like Space Liner 2001, and others that sounded like minimal techno two decades too early. I just couldn’t believe it.”

They got more experimental and free-spirited, as if the Moog was helping them decouple from the country’s traditions

I was thinking about creating music that feels outside anything, that stands outside history

Related: 'It will rock your house!' Inside the Iranian electronic underground

Electronic India airs on Sunday 17 May, 6.45pm, BBC Radio 3 and on BBC Sounds

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by Jude Rogers via Electronic music | The Guardian

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