The audio quality here is top notch, sourced straight from the original EMI Pakistan masters. After the clamp down, many Pakistani musicians left the country and moved to America, Canada and England. Television and cinema, as well as popular music, were now subjected to government censorship. This marked the end of the “Swinging ‘70s” in Pakistan as night clubs and alcohol were banned throughout the country.

Pakistan’s musical revolution ended in June 1977 after a coup d’état and the establishment of a pure Islamic state governed by Sharia law. Like their neighbors in India, the Pakistani record industry was more focused on releasing “filmi” music, which had just started to incorporate the electric guitar and electric sitar. Very few of the bands that formed during this time actually got to record. Soon, hippies from both North America and Europe began flocking to Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar.

Long hair came into fashion among young men and hashish became the popular drug of choice on college campuses across Pakistan. By the late 1960s, previous restrictions on musical expression began to soften and bands that were playing American and British pop covers became popular in Karachi’s burgeoning night club scene and at private dance parties. Situated between Afghanistan, India and Iran, the collision of cultural influences in Pakistan gave birth to music that was, and still is, unlike anything heard anywhere else on the planet. It’s all here: rock and roll beat, surf, folk traditional mixed with pop, film tunes, electric guitars, sitar and organ solos, brilliant percussion and arrangements crafted by the grooviest bands of the period: The Panthers, The Mods, The Bugs, The Blue Birds, The Abstracts, The Aay Jays, The Fore Thoughts, Nisar Bazmi, and Sohail Rana. Spending the greater part of the last decade assembling this masterpiece while tracking down most of the musicians in the process, Stuart Ellis of Radiodiffusion Internasionaal has compiled a mind-blowing set of Pakistani instrumentals spanning the period between 19. PAKISTAN: Instrumental Folk & Pop Sounds, 1966-1976

Sublime mp3 instrumentals