091: Love Songs and Trance Music from Balochistan, by Abdulrahman Surizehi

Abdulrahman Surizehi (Balochistan/Iran)
Love Songs and Trance Music from Balochistan (2006)
13 tracks, 133 minutes (2CD)
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One of the most exciting things about music is discovering a great new sound you’ve never heard before; a subsection of this (and one that happens rather rarely) is finding out about an interesting instrument that makes a unique sound that had previously evaded your knowledge. That’s what I had when I first heard/saw the instrument that you hear on this album.

I actually first saw it on a documentary about Afghan musicians, where it was called an ‘electric banjo,’ but it definitely didn’t look like that. It was like a lap steel guitar, but with keys instead of a slide or frets. Then I did some digging and found out its wonderful story. In the Indian subcontinent, the acoustic version of the instrument is also known as the bulbul tarang, but it’s thought to have been directly adapted from the Japanese taishogoto, which itself evolved as a German-inspired mixture between the koto zither and…a typewriter. Not only that, but the Japanese instrument also made it to East Africa where it became absorbed into the taarab ensemble. An instrument with a global history that I’d somehow never heard of – I love it!

For Abdulrahman Surizehi, the instrument is called the benju, and he uses it to play the classical and folk music of Balochistan and the Baloch people. Balochistan is a historic region that spans areas of modern-day Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran; Surizehi hails from the Iranian portion. The Balochi culture is much closer to that of Afghanistan and the subcontinent, however, and that can be clearly heard on this album.

This is a double album, so there’s lots of music to be enjoyed on here (although it’s rather impractical as part of a record collection, as you might be able to tell by the shape of the cover). Each of the discs is made up of one of the two themes, with CD1 made up of nine folk melodies and CD2 dedicated to four extended medleys of religious pieces. The lyrical themes are all implied, of course, as this is an instrumental showcase for Surizehi’s benju, backed only by tambura drone and dokhor drum. Over the course of the album, though, you can get a real sense of the range available to the instrument, from joyous to sincere. My favourite track is something a bit different again, the last one from the first CD, ‘Min Gudbrandsdal.’ It’s Surizehi’s own composition, and it means ‘My Gudbrandsdal’ in Norwegian, after his adopted home. It’s a really cheerful mix of a Scandinavian folk-style melody in the Balochi setting, and it’s dead catchy.

It’s always a thrill to hear something new. A banjo-typewriter hybrid playing folk music from a country that doesn’t exist? You know you’re in for a treat.