Underground Music Discovery

Fully improvised live performance recorded and filmed at Ikalto Micro Art Residence, Tbilisi.

Drums & percussion — Vsevolod Shuvalov Piano & keys — Evgenii Minevskii Director of photography — Vlad Amelin Camera operators — Maksim Syrykh, Andrey Rodin, Vlad Amelin Editing — Vsevolod Shuvalov, Evgenii Minevskii Color grading — Vlad Amelin Recording — Araik Vietingoff Mixing — Evgenii Minevskii

Tbilisi, 2024-2025

Cover of The Specials - Ghost Town

Punjabi Disco: The lost masterpiece which birthed British-Asian dance music

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Mohinder Kaur Bhamra was one such person who recognised the importance of that escapism. Having moved to the UK from India back in 1961, Bhamra was among the growing South Asian population in Britain at that time, and she came face to face with the extent of the nation’s widespread racist attitudes as a result. Nevertheless, she always maintained her cultural roots through music and encouraged countless others to follow suit.

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Hang on, you might be saying, ‘What does this have to do with disco?’ Well, through her performances, often accompanied by her son Kuljit, Bhamra essentially laid the foundations for all future British-Asian dance music, and her 1982 record Punjabi Disco was a particular revelation, without which Bhangra daytimers might never have existed.

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Despite its endlessly obscure nature, though, Punjabi Disco amassed something of a cult following in the years following its release, rightly hailed as being the origins of Asian dance music, as well as being a key cultural landmark in the story of the British-Asian community as a whole. Perhaps more so than any other record, Punjabi Disco told the liberating story of Asian people in the UK, enmeshing those traditional wedding-song sounds with a distinctly westernised form of dance music.

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Now, at long last, the prayers of those crate diggers have been answered by the higher power, which is Los Angeles’ Naya Beat Records, who have announced a full reissue of the album for the very first time. What’s more, the long-awaited reissue comes complete with a previously unreleased track and a collection of dance-heavy remixes, which help to capture the impact which this album had on Asian dance music upon its release.

• https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/punjabi-disco-masterpiece-british-asian-dance-music/

This is a weekly live stream on Twitch, which is then uploaded to YouTube