Filmi in the House
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Singh, who was born in Burma (now Myanmar), emigrated to Chicago with his parents when he was seven; they moved to Milwaukee when he was a teenager, but throughout high school and college (at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee), he returned to the area frequently. In the summer of 1989, at a Sikh temple in Palatine that his family still attended, he met Manpreet “Tony” Talwar, another ethnic Indian teenager whose family had come from Burma. Singh was still into “Prince and Michael Jackson–whatever people in Milwaukee were listening to,” but Talwar was listening to Indian stuff, like bhangra (the popular music of England’s Indian immigrant community, derived from traditional Punjabi harvest music) and the scores to “Bollywood” movie musicals, known as “filmi” music. On a lark one day in the Talwars’ basement, the two decided to mix filmi with Chicago house beats–copped from records belonging to Tony’s older brother–and T.S. Soundz was born.
In 1989 British-Indian star Bally Sagoo was already mixing bhangra with dancehall reggae, but Singh and Talwar say they hadn’t heard him at the time. One day in 1990, hoping to make enough money to buy a pizza, they dubbed ten cassette copies of their work on an ordinary tape deck in Talwar’s basement and tried hawking them to buddies outside a movie theater showing Bollywood musicals.
Last summer T.S. Soundz signed a one-album deal with RPG, an English branch of EMI-India. They recorded the new Kick Back 3–for which they properly licensed the music they remixed for the first time ever–earlier this year, but they’re more excited about the as-yet-unreleased Typhoon Asha, an album of the all-original tracks they laid down after Honolulu. The music on it isn’t far removed from what’s coming out of the English-Asian underground, mixing house and drum ‘n’ bass beats with original melodies, Indian percussion, and live vocals in Hindi and Punjabi. Ironically Singh’s search for ethnic identity has come full circle. “I want to reach beyond the Indian community,” he says. “I’d love to work with vocalists from all sorts of different backgrounds.”
