New Music Friday #2: Arooj Aftab stays true to old poems and honours space
Oh my god, I’m enjoying pretending to be a music writer so much more than attempting to make soul destroying tiktoks. I’ve been reading Tegan and Sara’s substack, as well as Patti Smith’s, riddled with books, wishing I had been born earlier. Writing is my favourite method of communication.
This week I haven’t felt spring at all, but reminded myself of the song, ‘Sometimes It Snows In April’ by Prince. I’ve struggled with some personal news and the latest IPCC report.
On the days it’s been difficult to get out of bed, I’ve gently blasted Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ through my phone speakers to coax me into the world of the living, cursing the Uber eats ads on YouTube reminding me I live in late stage capitalism and not California in the 70s, swaying softly to a vinyl player.
It’s been a while since an artist has hit me (metaphorically) in the face and said, “change the way you think about music”. Not that I haven’t heard Blue before. A teacher showed me it at 17 and I laughably thought, “what is this? it doesn’t make sense”. Well, it does now! I guess I’m at the age where I should buy a jazz piano book.
Winter has left my band’s piano, Dorma the Dorffmann, in bad shape, but Dorma has been my saving grace through covid. Funnily enough, on Wednesday, I sat down and wrote a love song for Dorma, not realising it was ‘national piano day’. I love synchronous moments like that. It makes me think the universe is trying to communicate with me sometimes.
I even started trying to learn classical piano when Covid hit. But Joni quit piano lessons after a year and half, opting to use her ears after a mean piano teacher boo’d her first song, later tuning her guitar to ‘the sound of birds outside’, and when I asked my friend Hana how she plays guitar so well, she said “I shove it into a random tuning and see what happens”. I’m going to follow those two.
Have any of you guitarists watch Tom Bukovac’s youtube channel? Me and my friends (by which I mean Jack and Vinz) are obsessed. And he said, “all pedals sound the same” and I was like, dude, I’ve thought that for years. I could have sworn all pedals do basically the same thing. Why do I have so many? Oh yeah. To drown my playing in reverb.
So I culled a few. Apparently the guitarists working in the shops in Denmark street (London) all hate pedals, too, because you should know how to play guitar well enough not to need them. I used to hate that, but now I kind of agree.
I wrote in my journal, “in ten years I might be able to finally play guitar properly, but I won’t sing like this”. We’re always racing against time, aren’t we? Although, I didn’t realise Arooj Aftab’s current age is ten years from now for me. Her voice only got better with age. I challenged my ‘core beliefs’ and realised I’m scared of tasks because I’m scared of failure. I wrote, “the joy is in the tasks themselves, not in the outcome”. As a teacher, I should know that by now.
Last week, I met up for coffee with the friend who introduced me to Arooj Aftab. We’re both in very strange points in our lives, feeling a little bit rootless. She also gifted me “Letters To A Young Poet”, which feels very apt currently sat listening to Boygenius, hearing lyrics about nihilism and anarchy, Leonard Cohen and female kinship. I often find it’s during our darkest moments the universe communicates the most, what did Rilke say again? “love your solitude”. Something about embracing it and what it teaches you.
Anyway, this wasn’t supposed to be a personal blog, but I’ve had a particularly introspective, revelatory week. Some weeks I’ll share nothing, others you’ll see right into my soul.
This week’s a special one, and it’s album heavy:
Love in Exile - Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily
Album : experimental / jazz / neo-sufi
In the shell-shocked summer of 2021, a friend sent me Arooj Aftab’s ‘Vulture Prince’, and I showed my mother in the garden of my parents’ house, openly debating quitting music. Arooj Aftab’s voice is one of the most powerful instruments I’ve ever heard. Worldwide critical acclaim and a grammy later, this latest release shows she is still firmly rooted in the spirituality and communion of music, putting collaboration and improvisation front and centre. She gives so much space to Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily, never over-stating her presence, always respecting the musicians giving the foundations for her voice to flourish. This album leans into the space, pushing minimalism further than previous records.
Scaredy’s World - Lomelda and More Ease
Track: rock / indie / electronic
Similarly discovering the album ‘Hannah’ by Lomelda around the same time, I repeated the lyric “I sent you the sun” over and over in my head, thinking of all my unreachable friends scattered round the world like coins in the cracks of floorboards. I didn’t know if Lomelda would release music again, so count my joy when she released this collaboration with More Ease. A more playful iteration of the sound of ‘Hannah’, the lyrics remind me of a stream of consciousness in some fever dream, or existentialist thoughts after smoking weed, demanding meaning from the root of words, “what are arms?”. And like most music I love these days - I swear I can hear the OP-1 in there.
Album: alternative / americana / folk
Okay, one of my best friends, I’m biased. But honestly, you have to listen to this. This really is the start of something. Entirely self-produced, these songs actually started as demos tentatively posted on a sound-cloud under the pseudonym, ‘Nora’s Bin’. Recorded on an old multitrack cassette machine, Hana looked after a farm in Australia during the wildfires of 2019 (of which the farm nearly succumbed to), borrowed wild-card instruments she didn’t know how to play yet from friends and wrote whispers about the changing weather. Words are formless and uncontainable, barely audible, as Hana lets the music speak for itself.
Album: rock / folk / indie
How could I not include this? Boygenius is my American vindication for not understanding or going to Busted concerts when I was twelve (NOT comparing them to Busted, just the hype feeling). Before I listened to the record, I would have said a more apt comparison is my generation’s (and gender’s) Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and George Harrison supergroup. But actually…this is different to music made by men. It’s a beautiful folk record more than a rock one, detailing a respectful ode to friendship. Phoebe Bridgers was the only artist in the past seven-ish years to give me shivers, crying at the show with the teenagers, when she walked onstage at the Roundhouse in London at the tail-end of 2019. I was soon proved right when she absolutely blew up with gen Z. This feels different to past supergroups, though. This feels like a group of friends who really love each other, of which there is no central star. Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker aren’t backup. In fact, it’s Julien who brings the biggest riffs, and Lucy who brings the literature. There’s absolutely no hierarchy.
Thank you Catrin xx