Travelers

Three years ago, the Brooklyn-based artist collective Found Sound Nation and the US embassy in Islamabad collaborated to launch the Dosti Music Project, in order to bring together musicians from India and Pakistan with a common heritage but rendered asunder by 70 years of partition. This debut album from the project finds them not only collaborating across the divide but also working with American musicians under the direction of Nandi Rose Plunkett, who makes beguilingly arty synth-pop under the name Half Waif. Sufi ghazal singing mingles with Bengali folk songs, laced with Appalachian fiddles and subtle splashes of electronica; in its best moments, Travelers evokes the brilliant fusions of Nitin Sawnhey.
With upwards of 20 musicians involved in various combinations, there's a certain lack of cohesion across the dozen tracks but the spirit is uniformly generous and open, and mostly gets them over the line. The material ranges from ‘Majare’, a lovely Bengali traditional tune given a beguiling Indo-pop flavour, to ‘Patience’, a weightless exercise in contemporary electronic dream-pop featuring the striking voice of the Lahore-born Zeerak Ahmed (aka Slowspin). Best of all is ‘Homecomings’, a triptych of traditional tunes from across the divisions of partition, sung in Msrwadi and Punjabi by the heartrending voices of Imran Fida and Mirande Shah.