Isobel Campbell/Marc Broussely/Redferns/Getty Images
Qalam strives to explore the interpenetration of different cultures. To this end, we have decided to launch a series of playlists in which music mediates between different geographical and ideological spaces. Our first playlist is called ‘West to East: One Hundred Best Songs’. It will be updated several times a week, and its curation will focus on how Western pop culture has reflected the realities of the East, whether they are musical, geographical, religious, or political. (The terms ‘West’ and ‘East’ should be taken as broadly and arbitrarily as possible.)
Isobel Campbell is a talented Scottish cellist who started out as a singer with Belle and Sebastian. She became famous for duets with Mark Lanegan (whom we already know from issue 29), and she writes solo records of astonishing clarity and structure. The national bird of India to which this sigh of a song is dedicated is the peacock, which in Indian mythology is the mount of the Hindu god of war, Kartikeya or Murugan. But Campbell’s peacock functions more as a mascot for a forsaken world where friendship is overrated and kindness is outdated—in short, as the Russian singer-songwriter Alexei Khvostenko once sang, the bird of joy has flown away to a distant land.