This is rather beautiful, a rather fine Monday morning Organ Thing Of The Day. Today, Sheherazaad wraps up a pivotal year, sharing a new video for the track Lehja, taken from her mini-album Qasr, which was released at the start of the year via Erased Tapes. A delicious video, a performance piece by Somya Kautia, ft Seven Sisters dance collective and directed by Raghavi Agarwal.
Fresh from tour dates across Europe which saw Sheherazaad and her live band stun crowds at Mutations Festival, Pitchfork London, Le Guess Who? and more, today she shares the expressive new visual. The final track on Qasr, the arresting seven minutes long Lehja (related to language and speaking-style), is a foray into Sheher’s literal storytelling ability. The song brings to life a mythical city she refers to as Sheher (a meta-reference to her artist persona). Lehja examines the turmoil that may surround mother tongue, pronunciation, and the fight to preserve disappearing ancestral languages. The song culminates in a refrain of azaadi, a chant that serves as an unequivocal call for freedom across much of South and Southwest Asia, closing the album as mysteriously as it begins.
Of the track, Sheherazaad comments: “I have always battled with Lehja, the final, lengthiest track from my debut album Qasr. Considering the song’s themes of estrangement and mutiny, it seems fitting that Lehja was the most stubborn piece to compose, the last to wrangle out of production, and the number I perform most hesitantly in live settings.
And yet Lehja, soaked in grief over linguistic violence and immigrant longing, is a personal portal for my own sense of artistic futurism that exists beyond this first album. It feels so sweet then, that I get to honour this ominous, honeyed folktale with a kind of handcrafted visual anthology. Through the genius of Raghavi Agarwal, the piece (of dance theater format) has been filled with a feminine placidness, intertwined with multiple glorious deaths, and so much else explored in the heroine-ic story of Lehja, my silent icon.”
THE ORGAN 