From music videos to a live Urdu Blues double album, Sameer expands his canvas
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Mumbai based writer, performer and film-music composer-producer — Sameer Rahat — recently released an Urdu-electronica EP titled Roz~marra, a poetic project, where Urdu poetry meets contemporary electronica. “The term, rozmarra means daily routine or the ordinary. But Urdu has always had this profundity for ordinary things. It renders the quotidian many-folded, weighted with something you can’t quite name,” says Rahat.The songs were written over a decade with the last one just three months ago. The album was mainly recorded and produced in about 18 months, while Rahat shuttled between India and Europe — through cities, hotels, green rooms and kitchens — and what emerged was a record shaped like a single day. “The arc is quite dramatic, but also, it’s just life, simple and repetitive.”Musically, it’s a departure from Rahat’s previous album, Aamad, which was largely acoustic-organic, slow-burning and cinematic in its sound. “This one is more electronic and mid-tempo. But the Urdu lyrics and poetry stays exactly where it has always been — at the centre, bearing the weight. The sound changed. The character and instinct didn’t,” shares Rahat.The album opens with an ode to dawn, ‘Ye subah’ and moves on ‘Kashmakash’ – a restlessness that lingers even when life seems ostensibly fine. “Vocal synths, a deep driving bass and an irresistible groove at its core — the morning it describes holds both contentment and displacement in the same breath,” he says. ‘Kaisa din’ carries the weight of the afternoon and the feel of an ordinary day.The title track, co-written with Ditty, imagines the heart as a small town, where faces are printed like daily advertisements on its walls. “Somewhere in that noise, someone you once knew becomes a stranger and the song quietly asks why we never reach out again. A gospel-like choir arrives to reinforce that central question, as if the everyday itself needs to be properly understood.”
