A new identity in Electronic India
The 60's students who saw the future in sound and the inspiration they continue to offer
In this issue:
Headliner India’s unsung heroes of experimental music
Revival Reminiscing about rugby and my brother
Aftershow: Carl Weathers RIP, the best of Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Holdovers, the late Neil Kulkarni destroys Oasis, Michael Jackson back in the spotlight
Growing up as a chubby and shy brown boy in 80’s/90’s Brighton, I yearned for more role models who looked like me. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciated the dedication of grafters like my parents who went from cut-short careers in radiography and accountancy to monotonous seven-day weeks in newsagencies. But when you’re a kid, safe can be boring and routine mind-numbing. There must be something else.
Where were the artists? The rebels and risktakers. The mavericks and mould-breakers we could follow. Someone to stoke our defiance, slap the need for approval out of us and say, go on, express yourselves. Bust out of that straightjacket of an acceptable profession, be it medicine, banking or law.
Is this a reflection of my sheltered childhood or my narrow window to the world at the time? As a graduate of a bohemian seaside town who was immersed in popular culture and wondering where he fit in, I doubt it. But let me think…
We had Handsworth-born ragamuffin Apache Indian storming up the UK charts in 1993 with ‘Boom Shack-A-Lak’, which found its way into the comedy Dumb and Dumber. Cornershop, fronted by Tjinder Singh, reaching number one in 1998 courtesy of a Fatboy Slim remix. Who else?
Goodness Gracious Me causing a stir on British TV by royally taking the piss. Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia raising eyebrows with Karim’s horny escapades as a bisexual adolescent who’s raging against his mixed race in 70’s Britain. The Asian Underground movement (an umbrella term used to cover the likes of Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawhney, Asian Dub Foundation and State of Bengal) carving their own lane in the UK music industry.
How we claimed swaggering, somersaulting Prince Naseem Hamed as one of our own, particularly the Muslim South Asians, even though he’s of Yemeni heritage. At a stretch, let’s add “that bass player from No Doubt” playing in the background, as Aziz Ansari quipped on stage. (His name is Tony Ashwin Kanal, by the way. And respect is due.)
So you can imagine my shock and excitement when I discovered that Ahmedabad, in my family’s homeland of Gujarat, was a hotbed of electronic music experimentation. And not a decade ago or whatever. Way back in the 1960s!
The story goes that Charles and Ray Eames were asked to produce a report in which they would make design recommendations across industries to catalyse a new India. Through the vision and wealth of the Sarabhais, a National Institute of Design (NID) was set up in 1961, with the Eames as architects.
Radical thinking and experimentation run deep in this family as author Daniel Williamson explained in Modern Architecture and Capitalist Patronage in Ahmedabad, India 1947-1969.
“The decision to link their textile production to new technologies and a burgeoning modern sensibility in post-independence India is unsurprising. The family’s patriarch, Ambalal Sarabhai, had long cultivated an identity as an eccentric moderniser of the city. He was the first citizen to own an automobile, took his family on frequent trips to Europe, and at the Retreat he set up a school based on Montessori teaching methods exclusively for his own children.
“In short, he used his prestige and wealth to create his own identity from a global cornucopia of often contradictory ideals and impulses. Indeed, his daughter Lena Sarabhai described his philosophy as ‘self-reliance’, ‘self-respect’, and ‘self-evolution’.”
Williamson says that Ambalal’s children Gautam (future first director of the NID) and Gira (who trained under Frank Lloyd Wright in Arizona) both designed houses for themselves and members of their families. Not only did Gautam design Fuller-inspired domes, but he and Gira also attempted to replicate the structural principles underlying Villa Sarabhai (designed by Le Corbusier) and the IIM [Indian Institute of Management] to better understand them.
This impetus to reconcile the past with present and future – and tradition with modernity – extended to another of Ambalal’s children, but her fascination was with sound. Gita Sarabhai had met composer John Cage in New York in the late 1940s (through sculptor Isamu Noguchi) and exchanged her knowledge of Indian classical music and philosophy for his Western concepts. Through him, and the encouragement of Gita’s sister-in-law Manorama Sarabhai, Cage collaborator David Tudor was invited to the NID.
In 1969, more than 20,000 gathered at the NID to hear the first Moog synthesiser in India, which had been shipped from New York with a dual ring modulator, a body frequency shifter and tape machines. The event was called Soundscape but it also featured lighting. Quite the show, it seems.
Tudor ran workshops and one-to-one sessions with students such as Jinraj Joshipura, who would have been around 19 at the time. Having this freedom to pursue a very singular and idiosyncratic approach to sound must have been a revelation. The 2001: A Space Odyssey fan later described his attitude like this: “As the synthesiser was so outside any other experience I’d had, I was thinking more about creating music that stands outside history.”
By 1972, tensions between the Sarabhais and the government had escalated, the latter finding the school “lacking of purpose” amid accusations of self-indulgence and impropriety. Eventually, pragmatism won out over utopian dreams, hastened by the 1971 India-Pakistan conflict and waning support from the Ford Foundation. The NID matured into a more conventional school for budding product designers and visual artists.
But what happened to all those experimental compositions? Enter Paul Purgas, multidisciplinary artist and one half of Emptyset, whose life changed as a teen after seeing Jeff Mills dj’ing and then discovering other Detroit renegades such as Underground Resistance. He went in search of Tudor’s Moog in 2017 and instead stumbled on a treasure trove of tapes almost “hiding in plain sight” in the NID’s archives.
A flotsam of interstellar echoes, frequencies, bleeps, quasers, tremors and currents travelling to a vast outer realm of possibility. Prophecies of a scene
that never was.
Purgas noticed a reference to “tapes for David” in a notebook and followed the breadcrumb trail to around 30 hours of music. His attention soon switched from the eminent American composer to five raw, homegrown talents: Atul Desai, IS Mathur, SC Sharma, Joshipura and Gita Sarabhai. Purgas spent a year with the British Library learning about tape preservation, including the restorative process known as baking, then returned to digitise 19 tracks from 27 reels.
Late last year, after carefully considering how to document and present this archive, Purgas released a compilation called The NID Tapes: Electronic Music From India 1969-72. It runs the gamut from (left)field recordings and voice experiments (Mathur’s ‘My Birds’) to electronic improvisations inspired by ancient Indian rhythmic Talas (‘Gitaben’s Composition II’) and dubbed out proto-techno (Sharma’s ‘Dance Music I’ and Desai’s ‘Compositions’). Tudor is on there too, manipulating tape feedback and playing with the Moog.
Rather than present an audible time capsule, Purgas sought to place their work in the context of the now. "I wanted to focus on the points in the archive where I felt the sonics travelled well into the present," he told Juno, "where they could transcend a historical sense of sound and feel like they were in a dialogue with contemporary music.”
As a nice full-circle gesture, Purgas asked Shreya Arora, a graduate from the Institute of Design, to make a unique etching on the fourth side of the double-LP pressing.
Joshipura is the only NID recording artist who is still alive. He went on to make big strides in the worlds of renewable energy and architecture, I was fortunate to hear him speak to author and lecturer Ayesha Hameed at the launch of Subcontinental Synthesis, a critical study of this period.
It features essays from Tudor authority You Nakai and a piece by Geeta Dayal that places the NID tapes in the context of other experimental South Asian music emerging at the time. The publication is another entry point or pathway into this archive, as was Purgas’ adjacent installation We Found Our Own Reality.
73-year-old Joshipura, whose parents forbade him from accepting a scholarship to continue his studies at the Rockerfeller Centre, was adamant that he never wanted to imitate the sound of a sitar or any other instrument. This is the guy who wondered how synthesised sounds could help submarines communicate underwater and us to decipher animal languages.
He used the technology as a vehicle to explore what’s next. “Musicians should compose independent of any baggage they have and see what the machines can do,” he said, before going on to express his excitement about AI.
How monumental it would have been to find these NID tapes earlier in life. As Joshua Minsoo Kim stated in his Pitchfork review, they challenge Western conceptions of Indian culture. Imagine what they would have done for a young lad at odds with his South Asian identity and already being beckoned by sounds from other worlds.
There is so much more to explore in this tale. What happened to the other artists such as Mathur and Desai? Purgas told The Wire that Sharma previously studied film and also wrote Hindi poetry. Did they ever record again? Where is Gita Sarabhai’s soundtrack for artist Akbar Padamsee’s experimental film Events In A Cloud Chamber, which may or may not include Moog?
How connected was the NID studio to other epicentres of creativity in India like the film industry in Mumbai? Many, including Purgas, believed that the dawn of electronic music in India was Bollywood session musician Charanjit Singh’s synth-powered 10 Ragas To A Disco Beat in 1982. These tapes say otherwise.
And did you know that the Sarabhais dreamt of creating India’s first satellite broadcasting network, focusing on the rural provinces first and then working towards the city? Dr Vikram Sarabhai – brother of Gita, Gira and Gautam – founded the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which reinforces the notion of this family being major paradigm shifters.
As far back as the late 60s, he initiated a pilot agricultural TV project called Krishi Darshan, “to demonstrate the effectiveness of TV as a medium for propagating new agricultural practices” according to this UNESCO report.
"There are some who question the relevance of space activities in a developing nation,” said Dr Sarabhai to the sceptics and critics. “To us, there is no ambiguity of purpose. We do not have the fantasy of competing with the economically advanced nations in the exploration of the moon or the planets or manned space flight.”
The NID was just one line in their “futuristic, mega science fiction narrative”, says Purgas. And people think Modi is ambitious…
PS Purgas’ Electronic India BBC radio documentary, produced by Alannah Chance, is an essential companion piece. Start there.
Rugby and brotherhood
I always come alive for the Six Nations. Ireland are favourites and a big reason for that is head coach Andy Farrell, who will take charge of the British & Irish Lions when they tour Australia next year. He’s come a long way since that dismissal after England’s embarrassing exit at the pool stages of the 2015 World Cup.
Last month was also my brother Hemal’s birthday. This month is the anniversary of his passing. Rugby was our greatest shared passion. We were both prop forwards from 5 till forever, though he filled the shirt and scrum a little better than I. Get to know him here.
So … rugby, Lions and Hemal. It felt right to pluck this piece I wrote about the impact of a remarkable tour of South Africa in 1997, which we bonded over through one of the first great documentaries in the sport. It’s about hard work, teamwork and stepping up.
“The wonder of 1997 was that, thanks to the documentary, I was able to see the true measure of each player’s character. How they sweated together, bled together, drank, cheered, commiserated and encouraged one another as a real squad, long before that word became a hashtag. All to overcome one of the toughest challenges of their lives.
“Although I hung up my boots almost two decades ago, I have carried forward the lessons of this tour into later life. My two greatest challenges have been the abrupt loss of my mother Nilu, who I was very close to, and my brother Hemal, who passed in the middle of the night after an aneurysm.
“Hemal was a big rugby man; we watched Living with Lions over and over. The sport became the glue in our relationship after he left for Scotland to become a doctor. He worked gruelling hours but would always make time to speculate on Lions squad selections or stir up debate in the Facebook group. Our time together was so limited; I cling to that early morning in an Oxford pub as we watched the Lions level the series against New Zealand in 2017.”
Read here.
The Aftershow
Carl Weathers 🕊
Farewell to the NFL linebacker who became a movie star, holding down an iconic role in one of the most beloved franchises in cinema. Who then evolved into a respected TV director of episodes of The Mandalorian and Hawaii Five-O, among other shows.
A leading man (though starved of opportunities) who had a dignity and strength that went beyond physical stature and the roles he portrayed. A great intellect too as you could appreciate from his interviews.
It’s rare to find a movie star who is also a really good actor (there is a difference) as this clip from Rocky 4 shows. Everyone talks about the fight scenes and the training montages. But how Carl flips from bro-viality to wounded pride, existential fury and then an impassioned appeal spoke to me as a nine year old. And it still does.
“We’re the warriors!” His male pride is showing, yes. But he’s also talking about vocation, compulsion and doing what you have to do to feel alive.
“There is no tomorrow” is also resonating this weekend.
An Oral History of Curb Your Enthusiasm
Get in that a–s. Palestinian chicken. Danny Duberstein. Beloved aunt. Here are key members of the cast of Curb Your Enthusiasm on some of my favourite episodes … and "social assassin" Larry David.
The Holdovers and rediscovering the joy of cinema
Director Alexander Payne knows how to ease the audience into a story and angle a mirror towards us. The failures, flaws, fears and regrets of his lead characters reveal themselves over time. Then something magical happens. There is a glimmer of hope, reconciliation or redemption that draws you in.
I felt this way about snobby oenophile and failing writer Miles (Paul Giamatti) in Sideways, grieving husband/bad dad Matt (George Clooney) in The Descendents and estranged son Will (David Grant) road-tripping with his irascible father Woody (Bruce Dern) in Nebraska.
The premise of The Holdovers, Payne’s latest movie, didn’t grab me. A troublesome student and grumpy teacher are stuck with each other over Christmas. It appeared slow and uneventful but you could say that about his other projects at first glance. This reflects the restraint in the trailer, perhaps. A lost art these days. It says to us: well, here we are. What now?
Happy to report that, after a brief period of indifference towards movies (WTF), I was engrossed, and not just because it reminded me of boarding school and eagerly anticipating the holidays. The dynamic between the returning Giamatti as loner Mr Hunham and newcomer Dominic Sessa as troublesome Angus Tully is fascinating. Like a game of chess, with more laughs.
That the teacher becomes something of a father figure is not surprising (see Dead Poets Society). What elevates the piece is Da’Vine Joy Randolph. Someone who has shown her dramatic range through roles in Ghost: The Musical, Dolemite Is My Name and the TV adaptation of High Fidelity. Her portrayal of care in the face of grief is quietly moving. Curious to hear Da’Vine likening the filming of certain scenes to being in a silent movie. I get it.
Here we have three souls, adrift and needing in their own way, who find each other over Winter. It’s magical.
Neil Kulkarni on music journalism and Oasis
Neil Kulkarni, one of the UK’s most incisive, provocative and relentless music writers, passed away suddenly at just 51 last month. He made his name on Melody Maker in the early 90s, recruited after sending in a lacerating missive about its white-skewed coverage. He later wrote for The Wire and The Quietus, authored books and stretched out here on Substack.
The fact that he was of South Asian origin is also major. There weren’t many of us, even in my generation, so his example carried great weight and offered encouragement.
Two essential reads:
1) His 10-point guide to being a music critic.
2) The aforementioned fire, brimstone and laser-guided shelling in this piece about Noel Gallagher and how Oasis ruined the 90s. See, I was a fan and still love some Oasis songs but I can more than appreciate Neil’s POV because it is delivered with such conviction and authority.
“As the godheads of ‘real music’ Oasis deserve nothing but utter contempt from anyone interested in pop or excitement or the true life-swallowing/life-changing possibilities of music — Oasis are barely music in the sense of sound that moves or is arranged in a way to excite emotions or let you dance — they’re more of a convincing backing track for a pasteurised, entirely mercenary, utterly thrill-free collation and rebadge of all the deadest staple-texts of British rock history.”
He spent his life building a $1 million stereo. The real cost was unfathomable.
A touching story about Ken Fritz, the audiophile obsessive who spent more than 25 years assembling the perfect hi-fi system (to his ears, anyway). It included a custom-designed $50k turntable. Then he was diagnosed with ALS.
Think Twice: Michael Jackson
Oh, Michael. I was not prepared for the deep confliction this excellent podcast series would provoke. Hosted by broadcaster Jay Smooth and journalist Leon Nayfakh, Think Twice takes us from the King of Pop’s genesis in Gary, Indiana, to the eve of those supposed comeback and goodbye shows in London. And into the tainted, miasmic aftermath of his demise as documentaries such as Leaving Neverland shook the world.
All with a measure of hindsight as they search for clues as to the source of Jackson’s extraordinary talent and legendary work ethic, but also any early signs of the troubles that lay ahead. Using Jackson’s story as “a window onto the world around him”. It’s fair, well researched and often arresting. The episode about The Wiz was superb. I hadn’t grasped the full significance of that film in his career.
Also, Is It Scary? is a dramatic opener that takes us back to 1993 when the first allegations of child abuse were made. Around this time, he began making a short film of the same name, co-scripted by Stephen King, where he plays a strange and reclusive mansion dweller who stands up to the mob mentality of parents who object to this “freak” spending time with their children. The recollections of people on set and the sound of Jackson lashing out – wow.
Bad was the first ever album I owned. The first ever album I bought myself. A cassette with matching pen and pad from Woolworths in 1989. Who wouldn’t have been astounded and transfixed by his ability? But what is his legacy now?
In The Man In Our Mirror, Greg Tate’s 2009 obituary for The Village Voice, he hailed Jackson as a post-soul, postmodern pioneer of black music. One of the great storytellers and soothsayers of the last hundred years. An important image maker – “an illusionist and a fantasist at that” – who was prophetic in how he amassed such a staggering visual record of his work. “As if he knew that one day our musical history would be more valued for what can be seen as for what can be heard.”
He goes on to lament the staging and orchestration of his public/private persona with the media and ever-loosening grip on reality. The rumours about a hyperbaric chamber, trying to buy The Elephant Man’s bones and even dangling his baby over the balcony.
“At what point, we have to wonder, did the line blur for him between Dr Jacko and Mr Jackson, between Peter Pan fantasies and predatory behaviours?
“At what point did the Man in the Mirror turn into Dorian Gray? When did the Warholian creature that Michael created to deflect access to his inner life turn on him and virally rot him from the inside?”
As news of an estate-sanctioned, Antoine Fuqua-directed biopic reaches us, promising an honest portrayal (“the good, bad and ugly”), listen and make up your own mind.
THINK THRICE?
I should also recommend this rebuttal, which criticises Think Twice for its unconscious bias in the breadcrumbed narrative it lays. How the hosts have examined events through the lens of a thinly veiled presumption of guilt. Strange how neither Smooth or Nayfakh have responded to these accusations.
Some important points in here about scrutinising the credibility of key witnesses such as Gavin Arviso’s mother Janet (who apparently tried to extort money from JC Penney) and voices like Hard Copy reporter Diane Dimond (who has paid sources for Jackson stories).
Think Twice isn’t the hit piece/hatchet job that some people say it is. But the team could have been more rigorous in corroborating sources and considering an alternative interpretation of events. I’ll finish the fourth part of the rebuttal and report back.
Wow.
This packs a punch. Well researched, heartfelt, funny and full of things I am glad I took the time to read.
Firstly, I’ve had a real education and an eye opening into a music cultural history.
Secondly, a vulnerable, raw and deft look into your heart ❤️
Thirdly, I could agree more on your review of The Holdovers (I went because the times for American Fiction were too late for me and boy am I glad that was the case). However, I do believe it is a belated Christmas film? perhaps one of my new holiday favourites. Came out feeling like it was the 20th December.
Fourth but not least, I will listen to that MJ pod and probably wince but also enjoy.
Thank you for sharing!
What a fantastic account on an unknown (to me) part of Indian music history... and the sci-fi dreams of the Sarabhais! This was a thrilling read, thank you! Also, I'm a fan of all the 90s artists you've mentioned... your piece sent me down memory lane.