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.”