Paikan – Dancefloor Fight/ Afro On The Rocks/ Detective Pandit Rey

A debut release from a new French talent with an ear for Indian soundtracks and funky grooves. But there’s no wishy washy Bollywood nonsense here, this is the real deal – three slamming pieces of hardcore sitar funk! Toulouse-based sitar maestro Païkan has been on a musical journey ever since he entered the conservatory at the precocious age of 5 to study violin, singing and music theory. Since the end of his formal studies, his experiments and collaborations have touched pretty much every far-reaching corner of the popular music underground. More recently Païkan began to lend his mastery of the Sitar to more a acoustic-led funk and jazz sound, which is where we find him here on his debut release. As you know, our area of speciality is in finding and reissuing the lost and forgotten treasures of yesteryear, so it takes something pretty unique to pique our attentions away from that mission. Put simply: any new material has to stand up to and not feel out of place with the quality of those cherished original, vintage recordings. It should also stand alone as a piece of forward thinking music, not be mere retro-tribute fodder. Those are our guidelines, and we definitely believe that Païkan’s three track 12″ ticks all those boxes – and then some! Païkan’s sound could be described as a four-way meeting of the minds between Shankar, Schifrin, Kuti and Hendrix. Sounds good, right? Well take a listen to the lead track ‘Dancefloor Fight’ and see if we’re wrong. With the slinky, heavy bottomed ‘Detective Pandit Rey’ and the sneakily laid back Afro-frenzy of ‘Afro On The Rocks’ making up the rest of the E.P. this isn’t only the best Sitar Music we’ve heard in 30 odd years or so, it’s also a record which defiantly stresses the ‘fun’ in Funk. A1 ‘Dancefloor Fight’