After Lahore Music Meet and Apocalypse Now, singer, ethnomusicologist and festival organiser Natasha Noorani has wowed us yet again with another project: Peshkash.
“Peshkash is designed to serve as a hub for Pakistan’s sonic history,” she told SAMAA Digital. “Peshkash is currently developing, maintaining and curating a sound library of archival material including recorded sound art (primarily vinyl, cassette tapes and VHS) and oral narratives (of industry members) to further research and awareness regarding Pakistani music. We’re attempting to collect as much data for the years 1947 to 1999.”
According to Noorani, we are constantly admonished for how disconnected our generation is from the music of Pakistan, there aren’t any avenues of accessibility to it. “So unless you exist in a particular domain of cultural capital, you don’t get access to music of the past or its relevance. Peshkash translates to showcase, offering, presentation,” she explained.
Noorani said that the idea is to make this accessible through content like podcasts, video essays and, of course, Instagram. “It also is a means for me to geek out with fellow music enthusiasts and historians,” she added.
So how did she get started?
“The alarming rate of musical erasure is what has pushed me to start this,” she said. “In researching and working in the industry, it became increasingly apparent that the notion of preservation of sound in Pakistan is inadequate.”
With Peshkash, Natasha is attempting to get various gatekeepers of cultural heritage and the music industry to give preservation and dissemination more importance before Pakistan loses all its sound history.
Along the way, the singer has discovered “many amazing local vinyl and cassette dealers who not only have an amazing collection but also are brimming with knowledge regarding the music itself”.
“Mohammad Hussain in Karachi and Naeemuddin Khan in Lahore have treasure troves that they are maintaining purely out of passion,” she said.
Put a record on
“The coolest find for me has to be Sohail Rana’s ‘Khyber Mail‘. Named after the actual passenger train, attempts to map out the musical traditions of Pakistani travelling Karachi to Peshawar via Dhaka,” she said. “Rana was awarded a Gold Disc by EMI in 1970 because this sold so many copies which blows my mind because I can imagine this being too avant-garde for Pakistan in 2020.”
For Natasha, this is also interesting because Sohail Rana is responsible for a lot of the milli naghmein, nursery rhymes and popular music that we still listen to today. “This piece of music however only exists for niche music enthusiasts,” she said.
The strangest find for Natasha was from Omer Tariq’s collection (Vinyl collector and DJ in Bedford) titled ‘Disco Fantasy in Hindi’ which has our very own Musarrat Nazir and Mahendra Kapoor singing Boney M songs in Hindi.
Most recently, she discovered that she had inherited the complete (but pirated) collection of the first Quran recording to be released in Pakistan. “The notion of recording and listening to the Quran was alien to the region at the time but Shalimar Recording released this cassette collection in 1976 (with the first set being delivered to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto) to much critical acclaim,” she said. “This was recited by Qari Khushi Muhammad who is also responsible for the iconic rendition of Qaseedah Burdah Shareef.”
from SAMAA https://ift.tt/2UatYV5
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