Barack Obama and Caroline Polarchek are already enthusiasts of the last minute musician.

When Aroj Aftab in the best school, he learned to play the guitar, he recorded making song covers and published videos of its functionality in House on the Internet. From his room to Lahore, Pakistan, Aftab sang the ten -minute interpretation of Jeff Buckley of “Halleluyh” and “Mera Pyar” through the local rock artist Aamir Zaki (“My Love”), frowning his guitar and making a song with a comfortable and melodious voice. It is the end of the 90s, and YouTube did not yet exist, however, the music scene in the Muslim majority prospered with the popularity of the teams of children who synthesized the classic rhythms of the region with the option to cool rock music. The AFTAB covers have spread as online forest fires, messaging wires and virtual forums, and announced the call of artists founded in Brooklyn, now Brooklyn, as a singer and musician.

“It was an era of pre-social media,” said Actab in a zoom in a sunny winter afternoon from his space in Brooklyn. The singer’s video is disabled (“I’m less fashionable right now,” he said), but his deep and calm voice radiates my computer’s screen, as solid as when you sing. “There was no young woman who would sing freely [on the Internet]. He encouraged many people, and my role in all this will have to have been a catalyst for the underground scene [in Pakistan], especially for women. “

The virality of the covers of AFTAB has caused the omnipresence of the pop room in Pakistan, a DIY musical movement in which young musicians who lack expensive recording equipment, a configuration of complicated studies and connections in the entertainment industry can record music in House and publish it on Facebook, Soundcloud or YouTube. For women, who can face the resistance of their circle of relatives through the shameless interpretation of music in a deeply conservative country, or that they venture less freely than men due to the risks of sexual harassment and the unpredictability of local politics, the flexibility of social networks has proven to be revolutionary. Whether it is the strong pop voice of Natasha Noorani, a sensitive sensitive trill of Slowspin framed to atmospheric mixtures, the surroundings of the Rico Child of Hasan Raheem or even the duo of rap, satirical reflections of young aturditors in their musical approach.

The good fortune of the covers of AFTAB consolidated its resolution to continue music not only as a race, but as the main objective of its life. Aftab studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, then moved to New York in 2011, where he has been making music since then, fusing the sounds of jazz, electronics and reggae with the popular melodies of his hometown, creating an exclusive and almost almost his shovel. His taste is so exclusive that he caught the attention of former President Barack Obama (he included his song “Mohabbat” in his list of favorite songs of 2021), and Caroline Polachek, for whom Aftab opened a concert in New York this year. The Rock The National organization even advised its album in Bandcamp.

Today, AFTAB has launched 3 solo albums, won a Prize from the Student Academy for complying with music in Bittu’s short film, and won a Latin Grammy for having provided Porto Rican’s songs to the song of Porto Rican “Antiz that the world is justble”. The new AFTAB album, Vulture Prince, previously released this year, uses the Ghazal, a form of devotional poetry of southern poetry in music. In the archive, it reinterprets the ecstatic arrangements of the mystical suffering Muslims for a fashion audience interested in one more target and a subtle sound. Since then, Aftab has won two Grammy nominations after Prince Buitre’s meteoric, making history as the first Pakistani woman identified through the recording academy.

“[I am] on the moon,” said Actab on appointments, one of which is in the most productive category of artists. “My collaborators and I paint very strong for Vulture Prince, and I am proud of it as a corpus of paintings. It is an excessive surprise, but it is also like, why not fuck? It is a great musical piece. Merita distinctions, it deserves a seat at the table, you know?”

The seven seven track vulture prince represents the culmination of AFTAB paintings and encouraged through the classic poetry of Ourdou, a language conceived in the real courts of Indian Muslims in the twelfth century, and which persists today as a national language of Pakistan. Most of the AFTAB paintings are in our place, even if it alternates between our and English, as in the song “Last night”, a composition of the poem by the Persian poet Jaluddin Rumi of the same name. “Last night, my beloved was like the moon / so beautiful,” he sings, while the agreements begin temporarily in the background, brilliantly contrasting the iridescent romance of Rumi’s poetry with the surroundings of Jazz and Reggae Aftab continued in his musical practice while living in the northeast of the United States. “Our is such an emotional language, and you can say a lot to say very little,” she says. “At one time, music transcends, it is happening through classical roots and becomes very non -public. This is what I experienced through development in Pakistan, then in a very hard jazz program in Boston, then living in New York for years. “

“Last Night” is one of the most positive songs on the album. The rest is darker, reflecting on love does not reward, as in the “Mohabbath” nominated for Grammys, “love”), or the heartbreaking disappointments of life in “inayat” (“blessings”). The silent pain that resonates through Prince Vulture is personal: Aftab lost his youngest brother, Maher, and a close friend, Annie Ali Khan, in 2018 while recording the album. “Music is my mirror is my river. Everything I feel, without a doubt, is emotionally translated into the music I do,” explains Aftab.

Aftab composed a poem that Khan wrote for her in 2014 to record the song “Saans Lo” (“Breathe”). Khan had been a model, who played in the clip of a song through the remarkable Pauchyst pop singer Shehzad Roy in the early 2000s, then has become a journalist, writing an electronic book about worshipers of female sanctuaries who posted posthly. She tragically followed her life at the age of 41.

“One night, I was doing this you deserve not to do: look for text messages, emails and old things. I discovered this poem I had written. And she told me:” You deserve to deal with this. “I never did it [at that time]. And I told myself, I will say it on the album.

A giant component of Aftab’s music, after all, focuses on the amplification of the votes of women who have been forgotten throughout history and in a different way to the margin and misunderstood through society in general. His album Sirren Islands 2018 used Trance’s music to convey the airy voices of the Sirens of the Greek legend, and an upcoming task promises to locate the voice of Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, a courtier and a charming chief of the arts who lived in southern India in the 18th century, and served as a muse for emblematic literature. AFTAB needs to recreate his poems in the songs.

“She has all this poems diwan, and nobody has composed them,” said Aftab. “I think it’s valuable, because those icons, who are women, are written in history all the time. And that does not mean they are not there. It depends on us to locate this shit and extinguish it. “