Various Artists — The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969–1972, National Institute of Design
Qobuz archival release review, Oct. 2023
The legend goes that Bollywood composer Charanjit Singh accidentally created acid house when, in 1982, he recorded Ten Ragas to A Disco Beat using the then-new Roland TB 303 synthesizer and the Roland TR 808 drum machine. And while Singh certainly didn’t intend to create a new subgenre of dance music — he merely wanted to infuse a then-popular genre of dance music with some sonic novelty — the soft bigotry surrounding the legend of this “accident” has always implied that electronic music, much less musical experimentation, was some sort of non-existent thing in postcolonial India. Like any other country, India’s crowd-pleasing, chart-topping music would give scant indication of what was happening in more daring circles but the country has always been home to a wide range of free-thinking musical experimentalists. In 1969, New York electronic composer David Tudor helped install a Moog system and recording studio at Ahmedabad’s National Institute of Design, and essentially said to interested music students there: “Have at it.” And have at it they did.
Over the next few years, during a period of unfettered artistic enthusiasm that would come crashing to a halt during the political violence of the mid-’70s, dozens of artists would create works in the NID studios, and this landmark compilation of just a few of those pieces documents the creative vibrancy of this tiny space. While the Moog is the predominant instrument here, it is utilized in a variety of inventive ways, producing both dense textural studies (Gita Sarabhai’s two “Gitaben’s Composition” pieces from 1969) and avant-garde sci-fi bloops (I.S. Mathur’s “Moogsical Forms”). Notably though, it’s not just the Moog that NID students were using; there’s also plenty of mind-bending avant-garde work being done with voice, found sounds, and tape manipulation. And although some pieces do utilize traditional Indian instrumentation (the tabla and shehnai field recordings used in the dream-like “Recordings for Osaka Expo 70”), the majority of the work is forward-looking and resolutely futuristic.
