Writer - Nandu Nambiar
Building a bridge between South Asia and the American East Coast, Sheherazaad is an artist who embodies multiple cultures and ties them together through her music. Growing up as a second-generation immigrant in the United States, her music becomes a voice for the Indian diaspora around the world and for those who feel like misfits.
With her debut project 'Qasr' released back in March, the artist is currently on tour, but we managed to ask her some questions despite her tight schedule.
When did you realize that translating your emotions about cultural identity and homeland into the album "QASR" would deeply resonate with immigrants worldwide?
There’s this idea with poetry, (which exists in certain Hindi & Urdu forms) wherein you must be verbose and complicated to say something of value. Personally, I always have diasporic people in mind while composing, and the very complex relationships we already have with “mother tongue,” or language in general. Often, we can be left only with the fragments of lost or forgotten dialects. Broken accents can taint and shame us, barring entry and revealing worlds of flux and trauma. Sometimes we speak like children, making grammatical mistakes, misgendering things. I find so much purity and story in this broken way of speaking, where the blasphemy of it is so musical to me, so ultra-contemporary and yet very folk.
I do feel geographic displacement is inherently an existential experience that births a fascinating, rich soundscape. Immigration, migration can create unbridled chaos. It is the gospel or objective truth being distorted and smashed to bits, a constant rebirthing and making anew. The songs are simply a channeling of homeland “auras” that I traverse physically and cognitively.
Also, I grew up with a rigid knowing that I would always exist peripherally in terms of whatever was happening musically here in the US. For me eventually, this spawned a kind of musicality that veered into a space of rejection.
2. What were the primary challenges you encountered while creating "QASR," and how did you effectively address them?
Qasr, was engendered during a time of family estrangement, grief over a lost elder, and the racial polarization of my country as I knew it. Translating to “castle” or “fortress” in Urdu, Qasr indeed became a monument — like encapsulation of the real strains of displacement, the push and pull of diaspora, and the depravity of erasure and forgotten roots.
3. Navigating the concept of diasporic placelessness is a complex topic, but you've offered a unique perspective on it. How did you find yourself evolving throughout the process of creating "QASR"?
Qasr became an intangible home, a personal fortress during a time of personal - political upheaval.
4. Could you share your experience of collaborating with Arooj Aftab and recall a memorable moment from the creative process?
I would drop Arooj love notes for her music sporadically over the years. One day she’d told me that she’d heard some of the music i’d been releasing, and suggested she could produce the next project, to my utter surprise. The process of working with her was essentially feeling so seen and held, knowing that all the iterations would pass through her shared cultural understanding and raw brilliance.
5. Your music and lyrics tell profound stories, often exploring experimental and dense themes, particularly focusing on overlooked women in society. What do you hope listeners should take from your art?
Visually and sonically, I typically lean into the the perverse, the haunted. And then enshrouding this with an aura of romance and desirability.
I tend to want to blend a satirical, hallucinatory feel with elements that are very real and violent. It’s this crescendo leading into the soundscape of merging places and cultures, where the result is often abrasive, dramatic, entirely illogical.
But also, the “ethereal” can aid in lending an aura, which enables us to dream, breathe, imagine. To engender khwaabistans (dreamlands) and planets with new realities and truths, where fiction becomes non-fiction.
6. How has the writing process for this LP been for you?
Composing is an extremely subconscious, sensorial act for me, where I play with scent and sight, taste, lighting, & silence among other things while creating music. So my sensorial world, along with my lifetime of influences, all seep into the music in ways that go undetected or unnoticed by me till years later at times.
7. Reflecting on your time in India during the creation of "QASR," how does your connection to your motherland feel to you now?
I feel fairly shy of and dazzled by the prospects of performing in India. It feels like the greatest responsibility and source of pride to return this music with its aspirational Hindi-Urdu lyricism back to the native land of its roots. To the place where current custodians of the language will receive and judge it. Perhaps the music is nomadic in nature and will never have a single Home, instead gathering a dispersed village over continents. Maybe the music will resist the so-called motherland and vice-versa. Or it’ll be a glorious homecoming. Still, to venture back to the subcontinent to perform Qasr would certainly feel like an exquisite expression of nature’s many cycles,
8. How are you feeling about the ongoing QASR tour?
Touring feels to me like a testament to keeping both the music and oneself alive simultaneously - a deceptively complex and laborious act.
Prayer is deeply important to my compositional & performance process - spiritual learning and wisdom is most prioritized and revealing to me, within the music and otherwise.
I consider music making strictly an act of worship and treat it accordingly. For me, it’s religious ritual and offering, “spiritual labor” so - to - speak. I feel most embodied and connected to ancestral energy when I compose and perform these pieces that are like portals for me.
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