From the files of the lost corners of the Internet, here’s a musical snapshot of electronic music composition in India in the early 2000s, in all its Korg Triton-fueled glory. It’s all via a zine delivered on CD-ROM as the Indian Documentary of Electronic Arts.
And yes, kids, there was a time when there were no algorithms to battle, no AI to impress with the right still shot of your face. You literally mailed out CDs of whatever random content you loved. People had to be in the know and request their copy via post. (The browser view was “ optimized for viewing in Internet Explorer 5, with monitor-resolution set at 800 x 600 pixels.”)
The whole project ran from issue 1 in January 2000 to the apparently final issue 7 in September 2004. And it’s a wonderful musical journey to that time. The project was a labor of love by New Delhi composer Shankar Barua, who remains a big figure in Indian electronic media today. IDEA was partly outward-looking, covering everything from one of the first-ever open calls for Transmediale in Berlin to circuit bending and an interview with Lauris Spiegel. But it also covered a fledgling Indian scene in electronic media and composition. That includes Vipin Mishra taking a tour of the Korg Triton, which I include here, and a mix of composers like Amit Shamra, Bacchus Barua, Arjun Sen, Ashim Ghosh, and others.
The IDEA was captured at some point by the one and only Laurie Spiegel, who produced an archive for New York’s Electronic Music Foundation (EMF). That site was lost, but lives on in some form on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine:
The IDEA <Indian Documentary of Electronic Arts>
You’ll encounter some issues. Because of a change to how browsers load media assets, on many pages, you’ll hear every audio file loading at once and auto-playing. (That is interesting if you’re up for some very experimental sounds—sort of accidental black MIDI.) In my case, I went through, restored some low-quality audio, and rendered one general MIDI file to audio. (Side note on that last point: Apple has removed the General MIDI playback capability from QuickTime, but you can still use VLC for the job.)
I mixed these into a mostly continuous music mix. Reposted from Refuge Worldwide to include the track listing:
As best as I could identify:
KJ Singh – montage of compositions (including a jingle for a tire store)
Shankar Barua – Jauntila (“jaunty”)
Amit Sharma
Vipin Mishra – review of KORG Triton
Vipin Mishra – World Dance
[unknown, various – soundtrack for “Making of Sculptors Studio”]
Ashim Ghosh
Asshar and Envision – Cooking Session
Bacchus Barua – Ghostly
Michael Robinson – Kirvani
Arjun Sen – interview excerpt
Arjun Sen – India Remixed, feat. Roshni
Dr. Raghuthaman Opeh
[Unknown – “pop2” from IDEA 2]
[Unknown – “moroc” from IDEA 4]
Sandy Bose – “RAVE”
New Delhi – Sab kuch toone
Arjun Sen – Journey
[unknown, various – soundtrack for documentary of In the Company of 5 Saints – Jaideep Mehrotra]
But I love this for being marvelously eclectic. There’s not any particular sense of genre. You get a lot of free-flowing composition, produced with the unabashed sound of ROMplers from the likes of Korg and Roland, which to our 2024 ear sound practically vaporware. These take on a beautifully loose sense of form. There are strong elements of Indian music thrown in, often in a popular style. Part of what I hope to capture here is the anything-goes sense of representation. Got a band? Made a film score or scored a TV ad spot? Made a rave cut? You’re in. And you also can hear (and read) that the computer and electronic instruments were still new to the scene.
All of that is worth revisiting, too, as I think as composers and producers any time our music is stale we should try to imagine that we’ve never seen the instruments we’re using in our lives. Totally break out of your usual habits.
Since I went with the music only, I hope it evokes an aesthetic feeling of the mood of the rest of the tech. IDEA did features on SGI as they moved into India, photography, media art, animation – and that’s just the first issue.
There’s also Newtek – not the one you’re thinking of, but a local animation and media house:
There’s also this great ad for your local music store at the time. Love the General MIDI logo:
Dig through the original archives on Wayback Machine if you dare:
And it’s worth just exploring the ongoing, multi-faceted career of Shankar Barua:
http://www.shankarbaba.com/
Laurie Spiegel is very much around and active, but her site, less so, so you’ll also need to go the Wayback Machine route:
http://web.archive.org/web/20230213075718/http://retiary.org/ls/
Oh, and the KORG Triton lives on as software in what’s now called Korg Collection 5, so of course I wound up messing around with the Triton plug-in for the last week. Oops.
Bonus round – more on Indian and Pakistani electronic music history
The above was really a mash-up of the aesthetics of a single e-zine, but Shankar writes to give us a starting point to go deeper:
By the way, since you focused on Indian composers in particular, you might just be interested in a talk I gave in India International Centre here early this year, focused almost entirely on Indian (and Pakistani) music.
Whereas I do drone on a bit much, it includes about a half dozen fast-paced video slugs that, – I like to think, – add up to a sort of compressed continuum.
I love everything about how this was put together, having just quickly browsed through, and will definitely be going through this later – full chapter/timestamp guide inthe description:
Exploring streams of thought with an off-mainstream India tilt, running from the beginning of the Universe through the cusp of millennia from the 1900s into the 2000s, and on towards the imponderable future, together with brief illustrative video-slugs along the way.
Excellent. More like this, please.