Music - Richard Cook gets headspin from some powerful Asian mix
It's rare to find a free-standing individual within the huge and Byzantine web that is dance music, but Talvin Singh is surely one. While his premier callings are as a DJ and tabla player, Singh has risen far above those straightforward occupations. He is the conduit for everything Asian in British pop culture. The filtering of bhangra and Asian rave flavours into the dance mainstream in the 1990s provided a brief frisson for thrill-seekers, but initially lacked a pivotal figure, someone who could stand as an articulate musician-figurehead and bring the movement into wider focus. Singh, a veteran of the acid house scene as well as a long-time student of north Indian classical music, was the man who fitted the bill.
The last few years have seen him make huge strides in his career, hobnobbing with Lord Lloyd-Webber and David Bowie as well as insisting, carefully, on the links between his fashionable work and his deeply unfashionable roots. Dance culture may involve a great deal of global shrinking, but there is still a formidable distance between the severe disciplines of Indian classicism and whatever is this week's beats-per-minute fad. Singh's virtuosity is invigorating in its naked form: most of the time, you can hardly hear it through the thick veil of sonics that forms the overall wash on his new record, Ha (Omni/Island). But when he does give himself some clear space in the mix - as on "See Breeze" and "Bobby Style" - Singh's fingers and palms on the tabla make head-spinning music.
Hearing him unplugged, though, is hardly the point of Singh's art. Like everyone else in this huge whirlpool, he is trying to make something coherent out of a sensory overload. The task is not to find new things, but create something with a singular life, something that isn't just a whipped-up trifle of tempting tastes. That pretty much caught him out on his effortful solo debut record, OK (Omni/Island), which won the 1999 Mercury Music Prize, but sounds like every kind of music he'd ever heard, all jammed on to a single album. For Ha, Singh has applied a bit of concentration. There is a kind of ensemble feel underpinning the parade of varied beats. The major presence besides Singh himself is the sarangi player/vocalist Ustad Sultan Khan, and even as the sands shift constantly around him, Khan's magisterial aura lends gravitas to the sound.
There has been much excitable talk of Singh heralding the start of a movement that will bring forward many performers from a community which has so far made little headway in western pop culture. But, for all its shine and apparent newness, much of Singh's new record sounds very close to kinds of music that an experienced listener will have heard before: early Weather Report, perhaps, or some of Can's "ethno-forgery" music of the Seventies. There are outmoded sounds such as analogue synthesisers and filters; long, purling lines of droning keyboard; and voices which are buried in or occasionally burst out of the mix, spirits from the ghost world of dub music. Singh has done his best to make a plausible bond between his ancient past and a hungrily contemporary feel, but it's the kind of rapprochement that only scholars of his "roots music" can weigh up.
Because, for the rest of us, it is the plethora of beats which still dominates the music. A musician once suggested to me that, if you were to set a beautiful Chinese folk melody alongside even the most deferential of western boom-boom rhythms, the beat would win out every time. It might be that Singh will struggle to find an audience this time around: a lot of Ha is rather too slow to be effective as functional dance music; and, in the end, the record is rather boring. It runs for more than 73 minutes, and Singh has yet to master long-form tracks in ways that hold the listener's attention. The club DJ in him is hooked on beats, and the musician wants the depth and structure of composition, yet resolving those imperatives never really happens on Ha.
Besides, Singh has a career to think about. In a recent interview, he had already begun to talk about his next record being "straight-up pop", with very little Indian music on it. Maybe the mantle of missionary doesn't suit him quite as well as we might think.
Talvin Singh's Mini-Meltdown is at the Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 (020 7960 4242) on 9 April at 7.30 pm
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