Soothe operator

Grammy-winning Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab is bringing her meditative, minimalist music to New Zealand festivals.

- GRAHAM REID

Arooj Aftab’s life has been one of movement: from country to country and through musical styles, which reached a peak when her sublime, spiritually calming song Mohabbat picked up Best Global Music Performance at the 2022 Grammys.

At 38, New York-based Aftab has come a long way from playing Oasis’s Wonderwall for friends at high school in Lahore to having Mohabbat on Barack Obama’s 2021 summer playlist. The song came from her hypnotic Vulture Prince album, which is mostly in Urdu but included a subtle reggae groove on the English-language Last Night, based on a poem by the Persian Sufi poet Rumi.

The album – on numerous “best-of 2021” lists, including the Listener’s – won her Pakistan’s prestigious Pride of Performance award.

Vulture Prince is a rare album that conveys rest and calm, despite being born of personal grief and loss. “The impression it gives you is meditative, calming and ambient,” she says from her home in Brooklyn. “Then other layers open up. It has depth in it that I designed, but that meditative quality, for sure.”

People take comfort in it, as many Aids patients seeking consolation in the 80s found in the holy minimalism of Arvo Pärt’s austere Tabula Rasa: “It sounds like the motion of angels’ wings,” said one. Or the 1994 Jan Garbarek/Hilliard Ensemble’s Officium, a pairing of soprano saxophone and medieval chants that sold more than 250,000 physical copies and now has millions of streams.