Five years ago, Zeerak Ahmed was going through a rough time. The Pakistan-born, U.S.-based musician, artist, and academic—who performs as Slowspin—would spend hours in bed, struggling with a constantly aching throat and a heart that felt “unbearably heavy.” Unable to sing, she would exhale slowly in drawn-out musical notes, trying to ease the pain and center herself. It wasn’t until months later, jamming at her friend Shahzad Ismaily’s Brooklyn studio, that she found the Urdu words from an old Sufi kalam coming unbidden to her lips: “Hamari, kuch yaad bhi hai hamari (Do you have any memory of us)?”
That moment of serendipity—inherited poetry emerging from subconscious depths and surfacing on a sea of improvised sound—gave birth to her new album TALISMAN. Recorded over three days of exploratory sessions at Ismaily’s studio and three subsequent years of painstaking production, TALISMAN draws on the contemporary migrant’s deep reservoirs of loss and longing—for a homeland that has changed in their absence, for the lost certainty of a non-hyphenated identity—and connects them to the devotional yearning of Sufi saints and Bauls, minstrels who have wandered South Asia for centuries searching for a path to the divine. Over 10 unhurried songs, folksy finger-plucked guitar, ambient synth washes, and empyrean strings coalesce into lush textural soundscapes, windows into the shared dreamworld of seekers across the ages. Ahmed’s lilting, incantatory vocals—often melancholic, sometimes incandescent—guide us down this mystic’s yellow brick road, a charismatic presence offering succor to fellow pilgrims on their journey into the unknown.
Opener “Holay” begins with Ahmed’s voice swirling in sun-dappled loops, drifting in leisurely counterpoint to co-producer Grey McMurray’s resonant piano and Alison Shearer’s ethereal flute, while Greg Fox’s drums rumble in the backdrop, like distant, arrhythmic storm clouds. The Urdu lyrics, borrowed from an old dadra (a semi-classical Hindustani vocal genre), speak of separation from a lover gone far away. Ahmed hails from Karachi’s muhajir (literally, immigrant) community, Muslims from across North India who were uprooted in the bloody chaos of India’s Partition and displaced across a freshly drawn border. She draws on that inheritance of generational trauma here, and through the rest of the album, as she repeats the song’s heartsick refrain, her voice shading each repetition in overlapping hues of meaning and emotion.
The ghosts of ancestral loss and displacement also haunt tracks like the lovesick “Piya”—centered on Ahmed’s wounded vocals and the raspy scrape of fingers sliding down a guitar’s neck—and the more distant ache of the meditative “Lilt and Forget.” As the record progresses, the red-hot pain of loss gives way to the dull throb of acceptance, and a grim determination to forge new paths into the unknown.