How I Read This Album
Not an interpretation of the “correct meaning”, but an attempt to explain honestly the inner logic of the songs
When I decided to write these commentaries, it became clear fairly quickly that I did not want to turn them either into a music booklet with beautiful paragraphs or into a small textbook on Sufism. Both paths would have been too easy. This album was born from images that are alive for me: path, light, breath, night, heart, silence, Truth, union, sky. Only later, rereading the texts as a whole, did I see more and more clearly how naturally they touch the language of Islamic mysticism and especially the Central Asian line of Khwajagan - Naqshbandiyya.
That is why I write here in the first person. I am not explaining to the listener how to understand a song. I am telling how I understand it myself - today, after the music already exists and can look at its author from the outside. This is an important distinction. Some of the meanings were in me from the very beginning, some became visible only later, when the twelve compositions lined up in a sequence and began to answer one another. For me this is the normal life of a work: it does not end at the moment the last full stop is placed.
The sources in this book are not there as a sign of scholarship. I turn to the Quran, to the history of Khwajagan and Naqshbandiyya, to al-Ghazali, Rumi, Jami, Navoi and to studies of Persian Sufi poetry only where they truly deepen the image of a song. I try not to pass off a poetic metaphor as a theological formula and, conversely, not to turn a living mystical tradition into a decorative Eastern backdrop. Where the connection is historical, I say so. Where it is my own conversation with the tradition, I say that too.
I perceive three compositions as special pillars of the album: Tun, Dil Ichra and Sukunat. Night, heart and silence. But they do not exist separately. To reach Tun, one must pass through path, light and breath. Dil Ichra is led to by the experience of light and darkness. Sukunat becomes possible only after the heart stops being merely “mine”. And then, out of silence, are born Haqiqat, solitude among people, Vasl and the final sky within.
In the end I hear the whole album as one story of the disappearance of distance. At the beginning there is a traveler and a road. Then there is a traveler and light. Then breath turns out to be closer than thought; night closer than fear; the heart deeper than ownership; silence fuller than words. By the end, what disappears is neither the world nor the person as a human reality. What disappears is the former certainty that Truth must be somewhere far from me. It is this path that I try to describe on the following pages.