Nawa
Ancient Sufi Invocations & Forgotten Songs from Aleppo

The story around this album is a litany of loss and horror in retrospect, though, at the time it was recorded in 2010, all the omens must have seemed good; the producer had come from the United States with an interest in the religious music of Syria—Christian, Jew, Muslim, whoever—all the burrowed-in local sounds that, he was astonished to discover, had never been recorded before. The musicians were an amateur group dedicated to the nuances of poetic litany and devotional dhikr, though “amateur” in this instance means merely “unpaid”, not “sounds unprofessional”, because their delivery is clear, measured, practised, and emotionally resonant: a deep simplicity. It’s the delivery that gets them on this list, of course, not the story, which ends with the city coming under heavy fire, the old buildings smashed by barrel bombs, and the Sufi singers fleeing for their lives. The news is still bad as I’m writing this. But here they are on the album, sending their humming sea-surge in and out until the atmosphere has tuned in to their vision of trembling blissful stability, a transcendent state that real life unhappily did not live up to.