Charanjit Singh’s Ten Ragas still sounds like acid house arriving five years early

Charanjit Singh’s Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat gets 27 June review attention, and it still sounds like one of music history’s great accidental time machines. Recorded in 1982 with a Roland TB-303, TR-808 and Jupiter-8, the album fused Indian raga structures with disco pulse and synthetic basslines years before Chicago acid house made that vocabulary famous. The new Light in the Attic reissue gives the record another chance to be heard outside the old crate-digger mythology that once framed it as an oddity rather than a breakthrough. What makes Ten Ragas remarkable is not only that it predicted a future. It is that it did so joyfully, playfully and from a distinctly South Asian musical imagination. This is not acid house before acid house as a trivia fact. It is a whole alternate origin story humming through bright keys, monsoon melodies and fearless curiosity.

Source: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charanjit-singh-synthesizing-ten-ragas-to-a-disco-beat/