Ten Electronic Extroverts from the Middle East and South Asia, Part 1
When we asked Finders Keepers boss Andy Votel if there were enough artists making strange and wonderful early electronic music from the Middle East and South Asia to put together a list, he asked if he was only allowed to name ten. When he turned in this feature, we found out he wasn’t kidding. Votel easily found ten extraordinary artists that were just as pioneering in their own way as the Moogs, Subotnicks and Schaeffers of the world.
We’ve had Votel offer his thoughts about horror music soundtracks in the past for us, so we knew he’d be passionate in his writing. But we weren’t quite ready for the lengthy descriptions – and important asides that begged to be published. That’s why we’ve decided to break this feature into two parts. (Click here for the second part of Votel’s exploration of “The Indo-Magnetic-Carnatix, or The Splice Trail to the Electronic East.”)
İlhan Mimaroğlu (Turkey)
Not unlike the North American electronic composers Bruce Haack and Ruth White, Turkish electronic tape-music pioneer İlhan Mimaroğlu found his first phonographic audience amongst children, making sound effects for fairy tale records and family adventure stories. As one of the earliest non-European exponents of musique concrète, Mimaroğlu’s adventures would eventually take him to the heart of the experimental electroacoustic music scene from where he would command unanimous respect as an electronic music pioneer and purveyor for over 50 years.
Having failed to follow in his famous father’s footsteps as an architect in his teenage years, but succeeding in his studies for a law degree, Mimaroğlu would finally channel his suppressed interest in music by literally working backwards, wholeheartedly embracing music technology and worrying about formal composition afterwards. In 2006 he told Bob Gluck, “New music, that’s what interests me.... You have to start with what’s going on today and then, gradually, go back to the past.”
Fiddling with the limited mechanical and electric devices around him led to a part-time job making sound effects by night. But it was his gig as a journalist for The Associated Press that got him to the West on a full-time basis. Mimaroğlu was offered a fellowship to study music journalism at the legendary Columbia-Princeton University where he would join the ranks of Suzanne Ciani and Dariush Dolat Shahi. The school’s electronic music facilities were among the most advanced at the time, and he took full advantage: Before the end of the ’60s Mimaroğlu was sharing needle time and US and Euro record racks with the likes of John Cage, Morton Subotnick, Tom Dissevelt and Walter Carlos.
Despite generating shallow waves back in Turkey (with the domestic Görsel Çalışma release) he would carve an important mark for the East in early electronic music with his vinyl appearances alongside Tzvi Avni from Jerusalem (for Turnabout Records) and collaborations with Turkish singer Tülây German (under the name Tract, for Folkways Records).
With an impressive “Western” discography of concrete, field recordings and synthesized music inspired by artists like Jean Dubuffet and writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, Mimaroğlu was eventually embraced by the major music industry as a jazz record producer for Ornette Coleman, Charlie Mingus and Freddie Hubbard. He used the proceeds from these projects to found his own Finnadar label which provided a welcome platform for a wide range of female electronic artists such as Doris (Sorel) Hays and Suzanne Ciani as well as previously untravelled music by Turkish performers like Meral Güneyman, İdil Biret, Bülent Arel and ace-face percussionist (and Don Cherry collaborator) Okay Temiz. It’s safe to say that Mimaroğlu blazed a trail for Eastern Electronic experimental music and magnetic tape artists for generations to come... a vital ingredient in the Splice trail?
Usha Khanna (India)
Out of all the popular musical media outlets of the Middle East and Southern Asia, the Bombay film industry is probably the most triumphant in its global recognition and financial success. But in spite of its forward-thinking approach, it’s still by-and-large a male-dominated industry in terms of music production. Back in the late ’70s, Bollywood counted only one female arranger and composer amongst its wide and varied list of soundtrack writers. This solitary female composer? Usha Khanna.
It was in fact during a hiatus from working with Bollywood’s leading horror film directorial team, the seven-strong Ramsay brothers, that one of the big-time male composers, Bappi Lahiri, made way for Khanna to produce her first foray into synthesiser and drum machines with the soundtrack to the bloodthirsty Poltergeist rip-off Hotel. This led to other disco-infused and sought-after LPs such as Divorce, 7 Bijliyaan and Shama.
Khanna was by no means an exclusively electronic artist, but for a short time she contributed to the industry’s desperate penchant for sci-fi top lines and Star Wars Meco’isms before the novelty settled back into gold shell-suits and hat-stand singalongs, accentuated by that all important feminine touch. Probably her greatest work, though, is Hotel. The horror industry is where composers go to let their hair down (Morricone’s mad-cap Giallo excursions being a prime example), and with that soundtrack Khanna stuck a 240v synth cable into Bollywood horror’s main power supply.
Khanna, now aged 71, is still building on her own filmography of over 100 titles, but while she’s paved the way for a few, the micro-niche of female-electronic-horror-Bollywood composers is still a relatively leafless branch of the mighty Indian film industry.
Ashwin Batish (India)
Another off-road trail from the sprawling Bollywood Empire leads to Ashwin Batish who, like İlhan Mimaroğlu, solidified his musical career in America. (Ashwin’s family moved from Bombay, via London, to Santa Cruz in 1973.) As the son of the pioneering Bollywood film composer S.D. Batish (who had also innocently assisted The Beatles with their pervy East-ploitation fixation) Ashwan spent his early 20s spoon-feeding traditional Indian folk songs to world music fans as part of his father’s raga troupe until one day in 1985 he decided to smash the mould and don a baseball cap, a Yamaha DX9 and an E-Mu Drumulator and bring his own brand of electro raga rock to the body-popping population of Northern California.
Cutting a privately pressed 45, Batish released the tracks “Bombay Boogie” and “India Beat” complete with studio snaps of himself surrounded by reel-to-reel machines and a self-flattering credits list. Within a few months Ashwin formed a three-man crew with his brother Ravi and token white dude David Harnish who brought a second DX9 to the party.
Their eventual album was a homemade slice of self-pressed ragas with domestic synthscapes and drumbox grooves, and it sold like hot cakes. Who knew home listeners wanted seven rides of a reliable one-trick pony that often lapped the paddock in lengthy nine-minute bursts?
That isn’t to knock a winning formula: This project was the first of its kind, and – spread over the 45, LP and compact cassette formats – it was easy for us all to own a piece of Ashwan’s sitar magic before some otherworldly hipster inevitably stumbles on the same routine and starts touring the experimental festival circuit. In other words, Batish had the Now Sound down pat!
A BRIEF SNACK BREAK BACK IN THE WEST
What shall we have? Hmmm, how about some spiced popcorn? When Jean-Jacques Perrey first made his switch from the Ondioline electric keyboard and began to embrace Pierre Schaffer’s radical experiments with tape manipulation, his rapid advancements to melodic tape composition and popular music didn’t go down too well amongst the avant-garde cognoscenti.
From the vantage point of today’s struggling major music industry – which repeatedly force-feeds an imagined target audience via social media, TV and fashionable peer-pressure tie-ins – it’s encouraging to harken back to an era when scientific tape experiments could be marketed and successfully sold to open-minded listeners that were eager to put them on at their next cocktail party.
As our technical abilities evolve does our discerning taste devolve? Does the triumphant quest for perfection kill the chase? Are we spoilt brats? In 1967 Perrey made the first steps to the gentrification of electronic music... He polished the concrete! He pondered the improbable, saw his goal, put in the hours and cracked the code.
He was a genius undoubtedly. But, sadly, in this equation, there was no accounting for taste. Concrete with a beat? So at the height of his career, and with the historic Moog landing in the rearview, there was only one title for his frequent production partner Gershon Kingsley’s flagship anthem of corny pop... “Popcorn”!
Was the buttery bastardisation of Schaffer’s craft verging on the sacrilegious? Or did he live to regret that he didn't lay down the last piece of the puzzle? The final ingredients that would destroy man-made melody for the rest of eternity. The straw that broke the electric camel’s back...
Omar Khorshid (Egypt / Lebanon)
When the greatest guitarist of the Arab world, Egypt’s Omar Khorshid, recorded a cover version of “Popcorn” it was if he was taking İlhan Mimaroğlu’s “...start with what’s going on today and then, gradually, go back to the past” quote literally. Khorshid had devolved with spectacular and confusing results: This version of “Popcorn” sounded like it had been recorded 20 years earlier by Duane Eddy on an Egyptian cruise ship with Metal Mickey having an emotional breakdown in the pool. If Pierre Schaffer had missed the boat, then Omar Khorshid had missed the point. And I wouldn’t miss this party for the world!
It's difficult to get from one side of a Middle Eastern flea market to the other without encountering an Omar Khorshid album or cassette. The fact that he was a famous actor, a member of the boy band The Tiny Cats, an Egyptian movie soundtracker and the primary guitarist for the legendary and inimitable singer Umm Kulthum secured him unanimous recognition across the continent. In other words, if anyone could afford a Moog it was Khorshid.
His songs were syndicated in Central Europe, packaged alongside the music of Elias Rahbani (Lebanon), Farid Elatrache (Syria) and even Sohail Rana (Pakistan) as part of the touristic and mildly insulting “belly dance” genre. The increasing amount of electronic elements in belly dance music through the ’70 is often attributed to Khorshid’s synthesised flourishes, which are best exemplified in his guaranteed floor-fillers “Rakset El Fadaa” and “Guitare El Chark.”
Like early rock ‘n’ roll or vintage cabaret music, the sound of Khorshid’s dance band is raw, direct and transportable with high-octane passages that allow for the other musicians or dancers to catch their breath. Breaks... with plenty of room for electronic keyboards.
Dariush Dolat-Shahi (Iran)
Despite starting nearly a decade apart, both İlhan Mimaroğlu and Dariush Dolat-Shahi were valued students of Middle Eastern descent studying electronic music at Princeton-Columbia University. Furthermore, they both went on to release uncompromising records for Smithsonian Folkways – albums I consider to be some of the best from the company’s expansive discography. Entitled Electronic Music, Tar and Sehtar, Dolat-Shahi’s 1984 Folkways album was actually put into motion by his professors. They played his final college project to the label, and they instantly agreed to release it.
Dolat-Shahi studied and played in Iran, Holland and America, and unlike many of the other artists on this list he’s never diversified into the jazz and pop realms. But compare Dolat-Shahi and Ashwin Batish’s records, and you’ll find some common ground. Each artist sounds like they could have been recorded in 2013 as a cut-and-paste reaction to a heightened awareness of previously untravelled Anadolu pop and Persian folk-rock music. The key difference, though, is that Batish and friends jammed along to automated machines in a pop and rock style, while Dolat-Shahi was faithful to the academic principles of experimental electronics, using modular synths without keyboards and splicing hundreds of pieces of tape together.
Dolat-Shahi recently explained to me that he would put together a single reel of tape for months at a time, working through the night when no one was using the hugely expensive studios. “It wasn't until the final playback that I would know how the music would turn out. It could have been disastrous,” he told me across his dining room table.
The very fact that I was at his dining table is kind of amazing. After a long-running obsession with Dolat-Shahi’s music had led to a number of dead-end threads between Tehran, Amsterdam and California (before working directly with Folkways records to re-issue his rare LPs), I was delighted and surprised to be contacted by his wife from a UK email address! I’m in Manchester, so I was anticipating a lengthy journey down south to meet him. But when we agreed to meet up and I got his address, I found it was just four miles from my own house. Alive, well and in good creative spirits, Dolat-Shahi still writes, makes music and creates visual art.
Click here for the second part of Votel’s exploration of “The Indo-Magnetic-Carnatix, or The Splice Trail to the Electronic East.”
