Liner Notes
Some songs can only be heard at night–lunar lyrics for evening ears. It’s the songs of the night that stand us tall in the day, eyes filled with the work of stars. What voices will we take into our liminal slumber? What patterns and pieces will break open the night mind’s path?
Arooj Aftab answers these questions through, Night Reign. On this, her fifth studio album, the music holds visual context, a cinematic soundscape that brings life to the divinely ominous space we call the dark. Within the realm of darkness, Night Reign points to layers of depth that blend each song into a narrative of uplifting surrender.
Night Reign is an act of tender defiance. Protest and prayer. It’s not geographical affiliations or the details of her birth certificate that awakens Arooj’s listeners. It’s her refusal to adhere to the limitations of race, borders, and gender, though her work is intricately tied to these malleable ideas.
What stories about the kaleidoscope of voices on this album can be told? “Na Gul” takes a poem written by the Indian 18th-century Urdu musician and courtesan from Hyderabad Mah Laqa Bai Chanda and stages a conversation between Mah Laqa Bai Chanda and Chand Bibi, the 16th-century queen of Ahmadnagar. Mah Laqa Bai Chanda’s poems have never been set to music, making them recuperative and speculative. Arooj is intentional in this honoring. The poem is not an exact translation. The deletion or rearrangement of verses blends tradition with her unruly imagination.
A re-interpretation of an old love song, the pleasantly haunting “Bolo Na” grapples with that oldest emotion.“Tell me if your love is real?” With the night come old feelings of the heart and the ambiguity of reciprocity.
“Bolo Na,”shows up in new form and speaks to the condition of systematic racism, gaslighting, inequality, capitalism, and the eradication of innocent people for personal gain. The acclaimed poet and musician Moor Mother adds texture to the song, questioning what we, the public, have been sold as “real.” She’s not pleading for anyone’s love. Instead, her verse draws attention to current terms of the human condition. In “Bolo Na,” we find a collaborative structure of musical worldbuilding. It grants us permission to be angry and over with the weightiness of the unknown. Here, poets hold the position of the mouthpieces and witnesses they are.
The biography between Arooj’s albums adds a string of elegant stories and new music histories–a collection that renders her music a kind of “hopeful disdain.” This biographical map includes the tools that brought us to Night Reign—Arooj as film composer, vocalist, arranger, cultural worker, student of tradition, and keeper of heritage. And yet, this map and these tools are keenly resistant to all the above, making innovation and experimentation possible. She’s unafraid of doubt and uses it to find her way. It’s not about locating her sound in the predictable category of world music. It’s about the wealth that accompanies a willingness to change our understanding of what we call the world.
If Pauline Oliveros’s assertion that, “quantum listening is listening to more than one reality simultaneously,” then one must ask, what realities are bound up in this album’s hymns of the night? And how might these hymns that embrace whiskey, divine eroticism, and unexpected iterations of romance help us unlearn what we know about articulating spirituality and pleasure in sound? Night Reign is an invitation or a call to action. This album permits us to give into the night because, in the night, we come into form, into the messiness of our whole beings.
Lynnée Denise
Johannesburg, South Africa
2024