Charanjit Singh's foundational acid house album gets reissued

Light in the Attic has reissued "Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat," the 1982 album by the late Indian musician Charanjit Singh that is now considered a foundational record for acid house, a genre that did not formally exist until years after Singh made it. Singh grew up in Bombay, where his family ran a store that made instruments, and as a child in the 1940s and '50s he practiced up to 16 hours a day, more drawn to playing them than building them.

That practice made him a sought-after Bollywood session musician; Arshia Haq, co-founder of the record label Discostan, said his best-known credit is playing on "Dum Maro Dum," from the film "Hare Rama Hare Krishna." Singh also composed on his own, and when Roland released the TR-808 drum machine and the 303 synthesizer in the early 1980s, he used the new instruments to translate the raga, a traditional Indian musical form tied to specific moods, times of day and seasons, into an electronic context.

Jeremy Loudenback, who co-wrote the reissue's liner notes with Haq, pointed to the track "Megh Malhar" as an example: the raga of that name is associated with monsoon weather, and Singh renders it with synthesized thunder sounds standing in for clouds and rain. The album went largely unnoticed on its original release and stayed obscure to fans of Indian classical and electronic music alike until it was first reissued around 2010, when listeners began noting how closely it anticipated the acid house sound that took off starting in 1987, five years after Singh recorded it.

Singh's grandson, Joshua Singh, said the earlier reissue's success caught his grandfather's own family off guard; Singh was around 71 at the time and, in his grandson's telling, barely mentioned that an old album of his had been rereleased. Joshua Singh said he first heard the record by accident, playing in his own car, before realizing it was his grandfather's music. Charanjit Singh died in 2015, and his grandson said performing for young audiences again late in life was deeply fulfilling for him. Of his grandfather's late-career resurgence, Joshua Singh said: "The soundscape of it is modern. Everything else about it comes from a disciplined old man's mentality of excellence."

"Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat" is out now from Light in the Attic, and lands in the release calendar among the year's other new electronic reissues from Charanjit Singh.