What Was Said: An Interview With Tord Gustavsen

 This music is based on a dialogue between instrumental pieces and vocal pieces. The vocal pieces are reworkings of ancient Norwegian hymns that are based on folk tunes, used in the Lutherin Churches a lot – hymns that I grew up with that are deep inside of me as foundations – both musically and spiritually.

I met and played some of these songs for Simin and I was struck by her phrasing and the timbres in her voice and her multilingual abilities (she's half German and half Afghan). She sings in English and in Pashto – the sound of Pashto was actually the motivating force behind the birth of this band, a very natural idea of re-interpreting the central lines of these hymns as mantras or as Sufi poems and translating those interpretations into Pashto and hearing how they might sound.

To me, it really felt like there was some core musical energy there. The project grew from playing a couple of these hymns together in my rehearsal studio and improvising instrumental sections around them. I also found this small collection of Rumi poems in an English translation that I had previously written music for but had never recorded, that also felt like a very natural part of that same repertoire.

My personnel relationship and return to a devotional, yet very liberal, Christianity, infused with Sufi and Tantra influences, means that, by necessity, this is a project both extremely heartfelt and deeply connected to myself as a holistic being, especially after having grown up in church and having to fight or wrestle with theology for a good part of my life. But you can still enjoy the album without this background knowledge. It's also just music – there's no preaching."

– Interview and photos by Tim Dickeson