A Very Special Cassette Tape Sharity

Suman Kalyanpur, Suman Geete, Volume 2 (EMI-HMV-Gramophone Company of India, 1983)

Before I was able to get my Indian Pop/Bollywood fix at Music from the Third Floor, I would occasionally buy discounted cassettes at the local Indian grocery. This is one of those tapes.

Kalyanpur is a well-known playback singer; there are many soundtracks and collections featuring her work. As Suman Geete Volume 1 is reportedly a Marathi-language collection, I assume this one is too. And while I can find a track listing for that first volume of Suman Geete, I can't for this one. If you can translate the insert, go for it. (One of the songs may be "Deha Shuddha Karuni.")

The sound is pretty bad on this one, worse than your average 25-year-old cassette. The recording standards seem to have been pretty low, and the tracks are clearly just taped from older records (you can hear the clicks and pops). Side one would only play in one channel, so it is now two-channel mono. The second side seems to have been recorded at a much higher level, and it seems oddly distorted.

Twelve unnamed tracks and cassette insert are here for the download. Consider this my May posting.