For Ahana, making music is metabolic — a way to digest and assimilate life's substances. Her songs are poetic excavations of creature-hood, magic, and the pains and delights of being a body among bodies. She writes, not to resolve quandaries, but to create sanctuary for the irresolvable.
Born in the UK, with roots in Portugal and India, Ahana’s work is intrinsically liminal, drawing on a confluence of cultural, musical and poetic traditions. Soma, her debut album, is a first glimpse into this dialogue. Its twelve songs were recorded primarily in Aveiro, Portugal, with local musicians from the region. They archive a youth steeped in a unique amalgam of philosophies, and attempt to un-tell a stagnant story — dismantling a long-held dismissal of the body and the material world, and wondering: could the sense be sacred? Could the soma be the soul?
Throughout the record, its poetics — both intuitive and deliberate — are set to organic instrumentation that evokes a freak-folk nostalgia: wispy strings and ethereal woodwind, grounded by thick, earthy brass. Still, modernity weaves through, in its language and pronounced indie-folk influences, mirroring an interaction between ancient and contemporary; a discourse on body’s place in the world.
She sings, ‘I will keep foraging…gathering…damaging…all of your worrying in a fungal way; where I love you so much you crumble away,’ — looking to the Earth to teach her the compassion and transmutation she is learning to embody.
To share song, for Ahana, is to circulate a honed and practiced softness, in hopes of a kinder, more just world. If there is something she is certain of, it is the soft might of tender body — of a form fully felt — for the suppler the heart, the more porous it is to change.
On Soma, she tells of being ‘ushered into [her] own heart by the mothers in the music’ — thanking the artists she loves for restoring gentleness in seasons of strain, and hoping to offer listeners her own solace: to ‘mother with this music’.
The artist wrote recently on her blog — which she notes is ‘sporadic’ and ‘ever-meandering’ — that song is ‘as life — life, the changing thing that lands on other life and changes it. So, when I say I love song… in a way, I just mean I love life.’
For Ahana, each day is a re-devotion, to song and to the sharing of it — as she weaves from music a ‘bottomless basket of fruits to pass around’.
Artist bio:
A lifelong solicitant of old wisdoms, Ahana is enchanted by things unknowable. If the world leans clutchingly toward conclusion, she seeks a counterweight — digging her heels into a deep love of mystery — and inviting you to rest with her there, knowing well the exhaustion of always pursuing an answer.
