Accidental Alchemist: How Charanjit Singh created Acid House

In the spring of 1982, inside a modest studio in Mumbai’s Cuffe Parade, Charanjit Singh recorded something no one else in the world had thought to attempt. While experimenting with the machines he’d picked up in Singapore - a Roland TB-303, TR-808, and Jupiter-8, he set classical Indian ragas to a disco beat.

Charanjit Singh had long been a familiar name in Hindi film music. As a session musician, his fingerprints were everywhere. The piercing transicord that opens Dum Maro Dum, the swirling keyboard intro to Meri Umar Ke Naujawano - Singh was a key figure behind the scenes. Composers shifted recording schedules around his availability!

But it was ‘Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat’, recorded over just two days, that would eventually earn him a new kind of recognition; years after it was first pressed onto vinyl. The record paired the modal structure of Hindustani ragas with machine-based rhythm. What he built in that session ticked every box of a genre that didn’t exist yet.

Acid house, as it would later be called was defined by a few key things: the squelchy, pulsing bass from a Roland TB-303, rigid drum loops from a TR-808, and a hypnotic, looping structure that slowly shifts over time.

Sadly, the record flopped. It was too strange for radio, too early for dancefloors, and too niche for anyone to market. The LP sat unnoticed in the corners of a few record stores until Dutch DJ Edo Bouman stumbled across a copy in Delhi in 2002 and tracked Singh down in Mumbai.

Singh was surprised anyone remembered it. When Bouman explained that the record resembled acid house - a genre still five years away in Chicago. Singh didn’t know the reference points. He hadn’t heard of Phuture or 808 State. The TB-303, used by Singh, would go on to define an entire movement in the West.

In his later years, Singh toured clubs and festivals across Europe and North America, performing for audiences often less than half his age.

Unfortunately, Singh died in his sleep in July 2015. By then, the record had already become a holy grail - discussed on forums and documentaries, sampled by DJs, and studied by producers trying to trace the edges of early electronic music.