2019

At a recent meeting to plan Songlines' 20th anniversary commemorative special (out on September 6), we found ourselves wondering what had happened to Sevara Nazarkhan. The Uzbek singer was a Songlines favourite in the early days when her Real World album Yol Bolsin (2003) won her a BBC Radio 3 Award for World Music. She followed with 2007's Sen and then four years later Tortadur, a collection of traditional Uzbek songs, which, as a digital-only self-release, rather sank without trace. Eight years on - and less than three weeks after we had been wondering where she had gone - this album unexprected arrived at the Songlines office.

Recorded in Tashkent and several years in conception, the 11 songs find Nazarkhan sourcing lyrics by various Uzbek poets, ‘about luminous, divine love, about God, about me and you’, she tells us. As translations are not provided, we shall have to take her word for it. Musically it's a light album of globalised soft-pop, full of sweeping strings, synths and skittering beats as she sings in a voice that never rises above a murmur and at times descends into a near whisper. Only on the moodily atmospheric ‘Kunlar’ and the echoing ‘Magar’ does she come close to recapturing former glories.