Fundamentalism troubles me. The world is too big and too intricate to conform to our ideas of what it should be like. In my experience I've found that most fundamentalists are'nt so much attached to their professed ideologies as they are to the way in which these ideologies try to make sense of a confusing world. But the world is confusing, and just because we invent myths and theories to explain away the chaos we're still going to live in a world that's older and more complicated than we'll ever understand. I'am not suggesting that we stop trying to understand things, but I am here speaking about a Genius called Talvin Singh, who can make us groove and help our belief systems to make more sense and end up cause less suffering. Coz, i feel thats what his music does.
His sound could'nt fit into any class, so Talvin Singh went ahead and made his own category. And now everybody from Bjork to Madonna wants to fit in. Not that his is the angry sound of the Asian music but it sure is the new grafitti of the Asian Underground.
As a young London East Ender, Talvin always had loads of classical tapes. At 16, he came to Punjab for a torturous three-year training under the Tabla Guru, Pandit Lachman Singh. But Britain had very few takers for him till he began experimenting with his music and jamming with few big names.
Although many music stores filed it in the Techno section, Talvin's 1998 solo debut "OK" flirted with the conventions of electronic dance music, drum'n'bass, house rhythms submerged under an ambitious fusion of Western and Indian classical elements.
The British Press and Radio, however does seem, to "get" Talvin Singh, certainly better than mainstream American audiences do. "In England radio 1 played "Traveller" which is like 13 minutes long" he said quite a feat. for BBC station Singh describes as "very corporate". "Then they said "do a tabla solo" he did a 45 minute tabla solo, broadcast on Radio 1, i am telling u guys it was really incredible....Talvin was playing these electronic tablas in a quite radical way. |
