The Rough Guide to Sufi Music Is Out Today

Muslim mystical music being as diverse as Islam itself, it’s only appropriate that the new Volume 2 of the Rough Guide to Sufi Music would highlight the eclecticism of Sufi devotional music from around the globe. Some of the songs here are straight-up pop, others take ancient themes to trippy, psychedelic extremes, while traditionalists look back centuries and even millennia for inspiration. There’s a lot of cross-pollination: the sacred becomes profane and vice versa.

The compilation’s opening track, Zikr, by Kudsi Erguner vamps on a hypnotic Arabic flute theme. On one of the real standout tracks here, Syrian group Ensemble Al Kindi join forces with acclaimed sufi singer Sheikh Habboush for an epic that begins with a rippling qanun improvisation and builds to a swaying dance. Likewise, a number by Pakistani qawwali singer and 2006 BBC World Music award winner Sain Zahoor is more celebration than invocation or lament – and is that a Farfisa in the mix?

Two Senegalese artists are represented: Modue Gaye, whose artful, improvisational blend of West African and levantine sounds creates the single most memorable track here, and Cheikh Lo, who weighs in with a simple, mantralike acoustic guitar song. Afghani ensemble the Ahmad Sham Sufi Qawwali Group offer the most traditional song here, with its animated call-and-response, while Pakistani songstress Sanam Marvi contributes a neat update on some old ideas, spicing her guitar-based trip-hop with an imploring solo vocal intro and then rustically soaring fiddle.

There’s also reggae from Pakistani duo Arif Lohar & Meesha Shafi, trip-hop from Transglobal Underground and the Indian trio M. Abdul Gani, M. Haja Maideen & S.Sabur Maideen, and a surprising lo-fi dub reggae remix of a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan number that actually beats the original. As with all the recent Rough Guide compilations, this is made even more enticing by the inclusion of a bonus cd, the Rough Guide to the Sufi Fakirs of Bengal, which has never before been available outside India. Literally a trip back in time, it’s a mixture of the blissful and the wary, with lute, flute, percussion and layers of vocals from a rotating cast of singers.

Dream Zoo Lives Up to Its Name

Dream Zoo’s new album – streaming in its entirety at bandcamp – is crazy fun. Surreal, trippy and eclectic to an extreme, frontwoman/cellist Valerie Kuehne’s stream-of-consciousness narratives leap genres in a split second. The band also includes Lucio Menegon on guitar, Jeff Young on violin and Sean Ali on bass and percussion. Much of this is similar to the work of Amy X Neuburg. For example, consider the album’s most interesting track, The Spell. In almost nine minutes, there’s a nicely apprehensive, atmospheric intro; trippy, theatrical vocals over pizzicato cello and what sounds like sandpaper on the strings; a pensive, minimalist solo cello passage that builds with layers of overtones to a quiet cacaphony, then winds down, then back up again, a chorus of voices growing more and more anguished: “Forget about geometry!” is their mantra. What does it mean? Does it mean anything? Who knows.

Kuehne matches her vocals to the lyrics: it’s an acting job, and she pulls it off, especially on The Flight Crew Was Rude, the surrealistically entertaining Paris-Berlin flight narrative that opens the album. Like a lot of the compositions here, it’s mini-suite of sorts, bracing pizzicato cello switching over to jarring astringencies and then to warmly consonant atmospherics which eventually go completely nuts. The bizarre, disjointed Architecture eventually coalesces as a stately, somewhat menacing, insistent art-rock theme (with a chase scene involving a chicken in a kitchen). Likewise, Plane Crash No. 2 alludes to and then finally comes together as artsy folk-rock, with a playfully swoopy guitar outro. Kicking off with baroque echoes, The Chase could be a spoof of classical music for strings. The most “outside” piece here is The Train, a strange pastiche that suddenly becomes claustrophobic and then morphs into variations on a Rasputina-esque cello rock vamp.

In addition to her work as a musician and composer, Kuehne is also an impresario: she books the Super Coda concert series at Bushwick’s Cafe Orwell, an edgy, eclectic, improvisationally-oriented mix of indie classical, jazz, world music and styles that defy categorization.