#nashenas

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Life is a Heavy Burden Nashenas 2022, Strut (Bandcamp)

Nashenas is one of Afghanistan’s most beloved twentieth century singers. Born in Kandahar in 1935, he was raised in Karachi, British India (now Pakistan) before his family returned to Afghanistan during his adolescence. By his early 20s he had become a popular vocalist, with a weekly national radio slot singing traditional poetry, adaptations of popular Bollywood songs, and (with increasing frequency) his own compositions in Dari and Pashto.

Most of his work is in the ghazal tradition, a form of Arabo-Persian poetic ode (classically a simultaneous address to an absent lover and to God) that has remained popular in the East for nearly 1,500 years. The songs have a meditative consistency of rhythm, his vocals carrying the melody as he accompanies himself with drones on the harmonium while a tabla player supplies percussion, verses broken by instrumental refrains that answer the vocal melody. Nashenas has a panged yet resigned style suitable to the form, never leaning into cheap emotional theatrics. He spools out his words patiently, great feeling leavened by enlightened reservation. I picture him with his eyes closed, sitting cross-legged as he hums and croons the words that billow from the incense burning within him till the room has filled with it. Despite the focus on his voice though, this is quite dynamic music: the drumming on songs like “Life is a Heavy Burden” provides a raw, intense counterpoint to Nashenas’s steady vocal, while the blissful harmonium drone of “I Am Happy Alone” finds a common note with the primary colours of music made by children, outsider folkies, and the untrained.

Physical media wasn’t common in Afghanistan when Nashenas was establishing himself, and radio broadcasts were the primary outlet for performers. What recordings he did make were largely for radio archives, and many of these were apparently destroyed in the wars that have ravaged the region for decades. As a result, little of Nashenas’s prime is well-documented, and prior to this compilation virtually none of what does exist had been released in the West. Life is a Heavy Burden: The Songs and Poetry of Nashenas collects highlights from a brief run of Iranian 45 pressings of Radio Afghanistan recordings from the late ‘50s. The liners elaborate:

Although hard to fully confirm, it appeared these records were part of an arrangement between someone in Radio Afghanistan and Royal, one of the major labels in Iran. …Recordings were presumably supplied to the pressing plant in Tehran to be manufactured and then sold to the Afghan diaspora in the country, or exported back to Afghanistan. It was ultimately unsuccessful, with a few singles released by Nashenas, Zaland, his wife Sara, and others such as Ustad Mahwash, Ghulam Dastagir Shaida, and Ahmad Wali. Whoever arranged it apparently did not inform the artists themselves!

You’d never know how screamingly rare these pieces are, or that they were not sourced from masters, from the job Strut Records has done with Life is a Heavy Burden. The fidelity is brilliant, clearly of another epoch in terms of technology but unmarred by the dust and rough handling endured by near-70-year-old second-hand discs. I’d recommend this one to anyone with an interest in mid-century music from the Middle East and South Asia, or its influence on Western pop and experimental music from the ‘60s onward.

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