- The Pakistani singer recites beautiful poetry over one of Jaar's most bewitching albums.
- In order to trace the unlikely connection between the Pakistani-born, New York-based singer-songwriter Ali Sethi and Chilean electronic producer Nicolas Jaar, you'd have to go back eight years ago to a London shopping mall. Sethi heard Jaar's music playing and instantly recognised Hindustani sensibilities in his melodic motifs and prickly percussion. Chance would have it that Sethi heard Jaar again on a rooftop in Lahore, and then another time in Istanbul. It became impossible to ignore fate's call.
Sethi hit the studio and began singing in Urdu over splices of Telas, Jaar's most recent solo release at the time. Through a mutual connection, Jaar received the snippets and was impressed, asking Sethi in a subsequent email, "Why don't you do more of what you did in this fragment I just heard using whatever you find interesting from Telas?" Speaking to Pitchfork about his approach to collaboration, Sethi said, "I just have this undying need to recontextualise things and make unlikely connections."
It's a sentiment shared by Jaar, who recently assembled guest musicians from around the world for two improvised avant-garde albums. It seems fitting then, that the stars aligned and the two eventually crossed paths. The result is Intiha, where over the course of 36 minutes, Sethi breathes new life into both Jaar's music and the historic writings of Sufi mystics.
Ghazal, the ancient poetic form Sethi wrote the album in, was taken from the Arab world to Persia and throughout South Asia almost 1,000 years ago, where it enchanted the royal courts and became a staple. With his training in raga, a core tenet of classical Indian music, the ghazal texts Sethi interpolates on Intiha are in good hands—he has his incredible vocal range and control. Over subtle, metallic percussion and nebulous clouds of synth, he'll erupt into an almost bellowed vibrato and sustain it until the clouds part, only to retreat suddenly, into hushed near-whispers. He never rushes, and the backdrops of spectral ambience Jaar puts together unfurl just as slowly until they become atmospheres instead of mere instrumentals.
In these hymns of longing you can hear every intake of breath, each parting of Sethi's lips, until it feels like he's singing from the inside of your head. There's a spine-chilling sensuality to all of the vocals on Intiha. They illuminate the creeping, cavernous spaces Jaar had built on Telas, so much so that Jaar described his contributions as exactly "what Telas had been missing."
That album, Nicolas Jaar's most elusive and indecipherable work to date, drew on avant-garde classical and free jazz to conjure its otherworldly mystique, which remains intact even as it's spliced into looping fragments for Intiha. Every sound oozes like some sort of viscous liquid. Plucks and bleeps have their wet dials on max as spectral pads glide undertow with enough resonance to unblock chakras. Take "Dard," for example. Sethi's croons float like wisps of smoke over a sustained, organ-like pad and bubbling percussive elements. The instrumentals are especially patient and simmering during the three track run from "Dard" to "Lagta Nahi," making each ghazal feel like a prayer, while allowing Sethi the space to prioritise emotion instead of adhering to rhythm and structure.
In a recorded conversation between Sethi and Jaar, Sethi touched upon how veils are a recurring motif in ghazal poetry. He suggested that striving to know the whole truth is not the most optimal way of being. Instead, having a veil between yourself and the truth is more meaningful, as it creates room for a far more necessary component: yearning.
Perhaps the album's title, Intiha—translating to "limit"—speaks to that vital distance between yearning and truth. "Nazar Se" is a poem from Sethi's teacher Farida Khanum about the catharsis of eye-contact, "Dard" is an ode to the pain of yearning, "Chiragh" "a scream from inside," according to Sethi. Sonically, it's all a continuation of how Jaar's last few albums have sounded: an interwoven fabric made of up ideas and feelings from the far future and the ancient past. Intiha's cover artwork, with its pixelated cave-drawings, mirrors this. Together, Jaar and Sethi unearth these poems of old and thaw out the unfulfilled longings that reside within them. At the enchanting intersection where these two musicians meet lies the lesson that no matter the time, place or cultural context, there is always beauty to be found within the suffering.
Tracklist01. Intiha
02. Nazar Se
03. Muddat
04. Raat Bhar
05. Dard
06. Chiragh
07. Lagta Nahi
08. Dono Jahan