Pauline Anna Strom/Aubrey Tennenbaum ©All rights reserved
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.)
Pauline Anna Strom (1946–2020) was a blind American electronic music composer who recorded a series of distinctly visionary instrumental albums in the 1980s. These albums were actively reissued to acclaim in 2017, by which time she had already given up composing, sold her synthesizers, and become a reiki healer, referring to herself as the Reverend Paula. The results of her healing activities are unknown to us, but Reverend Paula’s musical sketches certainly possess healing properties. At least ‘Bonsai Terrace’—her cleansing étude in Japanese tones—which clears and helps focus the mind.