Emily's Albums A to Z

Listened: Thursday June 17

I remember Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan being a big thing amongst cutting edge rockers (e.g. Pearl Jam) back when I was in high school. Despite being someone open to world music and such, I really hadn’t ever listened to him until quite recently, when I heard about Dub Qawwali on NPR. I get it now; indeed he was a great singer.

Gaudi (who I had never heard of until the story either) is an Italian electronic music artist who decided to mix early NFAK recordings with electronic reggae/dub music. At one point he uses a recognizable part of a Kraftwerk song as the backing instrumentation. All this on paper sounds slightly odd, but works really well in practice. You could conceivably listen to this during the more active parts of a yoga class, but it’s not so slow and mellow that it puts me to sleep as I work. It’s good for those times when I need to be productive, but I’m coming down from a very busy period to a more regular level of work.