Allah Hoo

This is the most purely devotional of his recordings that crosses into general listening — a single phrase, the name of the divine, repeated until the repetition becomes its own form of transcendence. The structure is deceptively simple: a repeating call with increasingly complex ornamentation surrounding each return. The tabla builds in intensity over the course of the recording, the rhythmic cycle tightening like something being drawn taut. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's voice at its most extended here — the passages where he takes a single syllable and stretches it across the span of minutes, bending the pitch incrementally upward until the note has traveled somewhere the opening implied but could not have reached directly. The ensemble responds, anticipates, and sustains beneath him. Qawwali was designed to induce a state — hal in Sufi terminology, the overwhelming presence of divine experience — and this recording operates with that purpose visible in every structural choice. There is no verse-chorus architecture, no conventional song shape; the piece builds and builds and builds until the listener is inside something that has lost interest in having an ending. This is music for a different relationship with time than most listening requires. Approach it when you have space to let something take you somewhere.