In the song, the instruments caw and rrowl with a great physical warmth; to me they sound kind of like violins, but I’m pretty sure they’re not. Once a long time ago I used to have a whole album of this stuff. It was on the Folkways label. I bought it on impulse when I was eighteen years old, because I happened to be in a folk music store one evening with a little money in my pocket, and I thought to myself that there might be worse ways to spend an hour or two than finding out what music had sounded like in Iran once upon a time. And now here it is a fair number of years later, and it seems to me that there are worse ways to spend my evening than hearing this music again: distant sounds from a distant time and place, making themselves known, gradually shedding the various over-academic questions that arise from the playing thereof and taking on substance — and rising, emerging from the turntable like the confused voices of one’s ancestors, spilling out from a bottle-neck of wires and through the speakers’ cardboard cones, speaking languages they neither knew nor knew of, making tenuous but palpable contact. |