Intiha

Description

Singer, songwriter, and author Ali Sethi had been fascinated by Jaar's music long before they began collaborating. He had absorbed these sounds for several years, casually listening to them and appreciating their subtleties in bars and rooftop parties in Lahore and London. When the two were finally introduced by Indian visual artist Somnath Bhatt, a regular collaborator of Nicolas Jaar who also handled the album's artwork, Sethi was well-prepared. He began sketching vocal notes using loops extracted from Jaar's acclaimed 2020 album "Telas," improvising seductive vocalizations and poems in Urdu over Jaar's light, temporal productions. Jaar was astonished by the result; "This is what Telas was missing," he explains. Improvisation has been important to the Chilean artist for many years. Even before he started making electronic music, Jaar played the accordion with friends on the streets of New York. It is at the heart of his practice, "a moment in time," in his own words. This is a perfect proof of concept, reimagining the world of "Telas" and augmenting it with a sense of ancestral melancholy and dizzying euphoria that is truly transformational. Sethi is best known worldwide for his attempts to revive the ghazal, an ancient poetic form that was taken up by Sufi mystics from the Arab world through Persia and across the Indian subcontinent, where it captivated the royal court. It is a style that has fallen out of fashion in recent decades, an elevated style associated with decadence, and Sethi gives it new life through his playful, revisionist covers and interpretations.