ELECTRIC TAAL BAND – s/t

Description

Electric Taal Band was a project that came out of the Covid pandemic, a necessity to work alone and some happenstance. I had stumbled on a box of Punjabi records for sale at Bollywood Music Center on Gerrard St. East in Little India — a store where I had been buying hindi film records for years. I wasn’t too familiar with Punjabi music beyond UK Bhangra, took a chance and loved the records; over some time I bought every Punjabi record in the store. I studied the records and bought a tumbi from Kala Kendar, a shop next to the music store that sold instruments. I learned the tumbi from Youtube videos and copying the sounds on the records.

I had started my all-analog record label Local Dish, cutting vinyl records from tape recordings in late 2019 and quickly had to change pace when the pandemic began. I shifted back to producing music mostly on my own and working with recordings I had made over the years.
For years I had been interested in electronic tabla machines and shruti boxes — somewhere along the way I became aware of vintage analog Radel machines and they became the one category of gear I was desperate to find. In Christmas of 2020 I received from my partner a gift of a vintage Taalmala that was by coincidence found locally on Kijiji. Over the next week I produced one track a day, experimenting with composing music in the Punjabi folk-styles I had listened to and studied in the context of a minimal electronic style based on the sounds of the Taalmala. I compiled these into a 4-track EP inspired by the “Super-7” format that was commonly released in India in the 70s and 80s; usually 4-6 tracks running at 33 rpm of regional folk, religious and popular music. I cut 5 copies and had no intent to release the record.

I had commonly at this time given demo discs of new tracks to Symon Warwick, the DJ behind the Turning Point party in Toronto to listen to and perhaps play out. I threw one of the Super-7 records in with some others I had produced and when he heard it, he loved it and wanted to put it out. To release the EP he created a label, Turning Point records and it was surprise “hit”. We cut over 100 copies and it led to more releases on his label as well as more attention to Local Dish releases.

Over time I acquired both a vintage Radel Talometer and electronic Tanpura locally via classifieds and experimented with integrating their sounds into the recordings as well. The basic idea was to take these machines designed for practice, which had their own incredible sound due to technological limitations and apply them to Indian music. Everything I had heard of these machines in recordings and videos only used them in an abstract electronic context. The main intent was and still is to use these sounds in collaboration with South Asian musicians and vocalists in the Toronto area, but this album came from both casual exploration and experimentation with the tools, as well as an inability to collaborate in-person due to pandemic restrictions at the time.