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40 plays
Khalil Ahmed — Qayamat Vol. 1 with Nighat Akbar, Mehnaz, Mehdi Hassan
from the original soundtrack to Qayamat (197?)
More great music from the East—this track is from Lollywood composer and music director Khalil Ahmed, written for the film Qayamat: A Love Triangle in Afghanistan. What a beat. I can’t find much about the film except for this bizarrely-written wikipedia entry, so I’m not positive about the title or the date.
This track from the glorious Hindustani Vinyl. Worth spending a few hours combing the archives there…
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120 plays
Nahid Akhtar — Society Girl
from The Sound of Wonder! (Finders Keepers, 2009)
Gonna finish out this Lollywood binge with a track from the excellent Finders Keepers comp The Sound of Wonder! The First Wave of Plugged-In Pop at the Pakistani Picture House. Here’s playback fave Nahid Akhtar again, this time on a Nazir Ali-penned tune.
In addition to this set of wonderfully weird South Asian pop, Finders Keepers has a double soundtrack out called Double Lollywood with lots of M Ashraf/Nahid Akhtar stuff, and they’re just about to put out a companion to the Sound of Wonder! set, appropriately called Life is Dance… stay tuned.
In the meantime, feed your dancing fix.
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710 plays
Nahid Akhtar — Susral vol. 1 (1977)
This psychedelic rocker was the work of genial Lollywood music director M Ashraf, who had his favorite singer, Nahid Akhtar, belt out those reverbed lines. When playback darling Runa Laila, who studied music in Karachi, moved back to her native Bangladesh upon its independence from Pakistan in 1971, she left a void for female Pakistani playback singers, which Nahid ably filled.
This track is really amazingly creative, utilizing a full canon of synth sounds, strings, tablas, surf guitar, garage organ and vocal effects. This guy was a music machine—his repertoire reportedly consists of 2,800 songs, from more than 400 films. Finders Keepers has a Lollywood collection out called Sound of Wonder! which largely consists of Ashraf/Akhtar collaborations… expect to see some of that soon.
track via Hindustani Vinyl
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Runa Laila — Aankh mili aur takraya
from Tiger Gang (1971)
Today I’m going to highlight a few Pakistani movie numbers from the terrific blog Hindustani Vinyl. It’s a treasure trove of gems from 1960s and 70s Bollywood and Lollywood (Pakistan’s movie capital, Lahore), but unfortunately the blog serves as an appetizer for a German rare records vendor of the same name, and the tracks are all cut about 2/3rds through. Don’t let that deter you—some great discoveries await!
This one’s a hip number sung by Bangladeshi playback singer Runa Laila for the film Tiger Gang aka Kommissar X jagt die roten Tiger, a story of drug addicts and gangsters. It was a rare collaboration between Austrian film director Harald Reinl and Lollywood producers, but despite (or maybe because of) the subject matter, it was a box office flop (and has only scored 4.5 stars on imdb). Ouch.
Here’s a video clip of this song from the movie.
