Im Nin'alu

What Ofra Haza achieved with this recording in 1988 shouldn't have been possible: she took a 16th-century Hebrew devotional poem from the Yemenite Jewish tradition, set it against a four-on-the-floor electronic beat and sequenced synth lines straight from the European club underground, and produced something that felt ancient and futuristic simultaneously. Her voice is the entire argument — a Yemenite-trained instrument capable of melismatic ornaments that move through quarter tones, each phrase decorated with microtonal turns that Western pop ears had never encountered in this context. The contrast between the clinical precision of the drum machine and the living, breathing flexibility of those vocal runs creates an almost physical tension. The lyric, drawn from a poem by the kabbalist Rabbi Shalom Shabazi, concerns gates of prayer that will never be closed — a message of persisting faith that acquires new meaning when projected over synthesizers at 128 BPM. It crossed cultural borders that seemed impermeable at the time, appearing in clubs in London and New York alongside records that had no interest in liturgical tradition. You feel it both as a devotional act and as pure kinetic energy, the two impulses never resolving into each other but coexisting in productive friction.