If you met me in real life you’d be quick to discover that I am a born and raised Canadian prairie boy from Pakistani parents. The two worlds couldn’t be further apart but for me growing up with banjos and panchods I secretly knew the two worlds could meet musically. There’s a certain emotion that only folk music can evoke, it brings out the little leprechaun inside you that dances, sings and rejoices to the stories of your land. I’ve always thought of South Asian and Western folk music as one.
This fascination of two cultures turns into creative sparks when I see punjabi truck drivers hauling long loads across the prairie skies and I think “hey, this could sound like southern qawwali blues rock”, picture the black keys meet Nusrat. The denim jeans and diesel are the electric guitar and the serenity of the flat landscape are the heavenly vocals of qawwal.
So when I heard the Dharohar Project, Laura Marling & Mumford & Sons EP, I gotta say I never heard music this close to home, a home that’s simply my little Asia in the prairies.
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via rollingstone
On their debut, Sigh No More, English quartet Mumford and Sons cooked up rousing, romantic folk rock perfect for sloshed barroom singalongs, earning two Grammy nominations in the process. For this EP, they took a page from the George Harrison playbook, recording in Delhi, India, with fellow touring partner Laura Marling and a nine-member collective of Rajasthani musicians called the Dharohar Project. The result sounds like a pub band crashing an Indian wedding: “Devil’s Spoke,” which Marling originally cut as a quiet, unassuming acoustic tune, is turned into a lively foot-stomper, thanks to Winston Marshall’s banjo and Dharohar Project’s wailing vocals and clacking, polyrhythmic percussion. Mumford and Sons’ “To Darkness,” a sleepy B side, is reborn as a celebratory yawp, with new lyrics and a slow-burning backbeat that eventually explodes into joyful cacophony. The next logical step in Mumford and Sons’ career? Sitar lessons.
Devil’s Spoke / Sneh Ko Marg
To Darkness / Kripa
