Green is a loaded color for some of us. Green is Islam. Green is Pakistan. It is the dominant color on the Pakistani flag and consequently inextricably linked to national identity – saturating government seals, corporate logos, athletic uniforms, and more. It appears prominently in Pakistani-American artist Umber Majeed’s work. Majeed’s choice of green, however, … Read More
Love Letter to the Biryani at Wahid’s, or A Joyous Poem in the Center Sheets of stapled steel fashion a fast shelter for the city’s appetites. Hungry, hungered, & hungering, may all in one night in these dense tendrils be converged. From all its next-doors, more spills onto the ear than the eye can hold. … Read More
I’m working from home now. Outside there’s a pandemic on and I have few reasons to leave my desk. Time feels like something that belonged to the people who lived before. Now the days run together. Night bleeds into morning which languishes into the afternoon. The death of the sun, the rise of the moon, … Read More
Zain Alam, the artist behind the music project Humeysha, released a new single, “You Always,” on Bandcamp Friday. All proceeds from the track will go to Bed-Stuy Strong and India Against Corona, to organizations responding to an unprecedented global crisis. “You Always” landlessly moves across language and sound and evokes something so effectively unterritorialized, diasporic, … Read More
Tasneem is a songwriter, producer, and multidisciplinary artist whose most recent EP, Just Before the World Ends, dropped late last year. Tasneem, who recently relocated from LA to Toronto, produced their own record and is sharing their experience with other artists who may feel isolated in their creative processes. Just before the pandemic took hold … Read More
Anjali Taneja’s latest single, “Golden Linings,” is a soulful reminder that there’s a powerful beauty in surviving and growing from the hard shit that life throws at us. Co-produced and written with producer Mars Today, guitarist Joel Van Dijk, and Charlie Sierra, the single provides a conversation about pain. As her lyrics go, “golden linings, … Read More
Mequitta Ahuja’s 2019 painting Xpect depicts a woman in a red dress reclining on two chairs that have been draped with bright blue fabric. The large painting directly behind her, the smaller painting on the floor in the background, and the lack of furniture around the woman imply that we are in an art gallery. … Read More
Since the 1940s, the beginning of the Golden Age of Hindi cinema, the Sufi song form of qawwali has been a prominent feature in Bollywood film. Due to the rich sociocultural and religious history of qawwali in the subcontinent, it is easy, even for South Asians, to picture the qawwali as a solely Islamic sacred … Read More
We’re missing songs of the summer. And, for many of us still in lockdown, we’re missing the summer entirely. Rafi’s new single “Dumbfound” gives us back some of what we’ve lost this year in ease and carefree spirit. With his friends on the beach, and shot simply by Bledar Fida and Thalia Perez and edited … Read More
A syzygy occurs when three planetary or celestial bodies are in alignment — when the sun, earth, and moon are in a straight-line configuration. Qais Essar and Alam Khan’s latest single, “Syzygy,” brings their traditional rabbab and sarod instruments into a new kind of alignment. They wrote and recorded the song all in quarantine, from … Read More
