Sajid & Zeeshan - The Harvest

They first conquered the music scene with their song King of Self. Now they’re back with a brand new album, and releasing it in a novel way: as a free download, one song at a time. Sajid Ghafoor and Zeeshan Parwez are the flag bearers of English music in the Pakistani music industry, and their sophomore album, The Harvest, shows just why the duo has captured the interest of listeners everywhere. Here’s what they had to say about their new release:

Us: Please tell Us about your new album, The Harvest.
Sajid & Zeeshan: The title says it all. We worked hard for this one and followed a process to bring out the good crop. Musically and lyrically this album is a step ahead of our previous album. We tried to push ourselves more this time and we’re glad the response is quite good.

Us: How were the songs made? And how did they come together to form the album?
S&Z: All the songs were composed and written the same way it happened for the previous album, One Light Year at Snail Speed. No formula was ever used. It was more like starting off where we left it. The lyrics revolve around the “self” and everything that relates to the “self” – the achievements, the losses, the acceptance, the will to keep moving ahead; thinking for and thus beyond the self. It’s about happiness, pain, gratitude, celebration…anything that moves the soul from the inside.

Us: How has your sound progressed since the first album, One Light Year at Snail Speed?
S&Z: We believe it is more mature, includes more genres, and has some interesting tunes for everyone. It is the sort of album where anybody will be able to connect to its music and lyrics. It’s easy listening and gentle to the soul too.

Us: Your sophomore album comes nearly five years after your debut. Why the delay?
S&Z: The album was ready a year back, but we had issues such as which record label to go with and why, etcetera. Finally we decided it’s best to give it out to our fans for free. Even last time we faced some distribution issues. At least this time, it’s only a click away at sajidandzeeshan.com.

Us: Why did you choose to release the album digitally and for free? Who suggested this idea, and how did you decide this was the best way to unveil the new material?
S&Z: We decided that mutually, and we only did it for one reason: to make sure our music spreads as far as it possibly can.

Us: Will the album also get a physical release? If so, when?
S&Z: In CD format? Not really, but if anyone wants to, they can easily download our music and burn it on a CD and get the printouts for the covers too, and there you go, the CD is right there! :)

Us: Internationally, some musicians choose to give away their music for free while also finding ways to monetise their work. Do you also have a particular business model in mind?
S&Z: Nothing in mind yet. We’re going with the flow of things. Though as musicians based in Pakistan, just like any other musician out here, we all rely on concerts when it comes to money.

Us: Which song(s) from the album are each of you most proud of?
S&Z: We love the whole album. It’s hard to pick just one or few of them. To us they’re all gems.


Us: You recently released the video of Start with a Scratch. Please tell us about the video.
S&Z: It’s the first song from the album and we tried something new here. It made sense to go with the first track. The video was pretty tiring but rewarding at the same time. It was a lovely experience as this time we had quite a few locations to shoot. The concept of the video is simple. The video resonates with the lyrics of the song, and gives out the same “feel” to the eyes that the song gives to the “ears”. That was our concept, to blend it well.

Us: Which video(s) are you planning to release next?
S&Z: Personal Beast, Sanity, and Everything Changes a.k.a. Out of My Way.

Us: Do you think English music has progressed since you first appeared on the scene? Do you think it now has a wider audience and/or greater acceptance?
S&Z: Comparatively? Yes. Otherwise? Not really. But still glad things are progressing. These days more people are doing music in English and that is only happening since more people are listening to English music too.

Us: What can we expect from Sajid & Zeeshan in the coming months?
S&Z: More music and hopefully concerts too.



Us Magazine, The News - 17th February, 2012 


Pakistani English Music Industry

Sajid & Zeeshan - The Harvest

When we were growing up, listening to the likes of Junoon and Jazba, all I wanted was the repressed passion and misdirected anger I saw all around me to be voiced, so that it could match the feverish pitch of my inner turmoil.

A friend who left for Australia once said: “… the best thing about Pakistan is that nothing ever changes, but that is also the worst thing about Pakistan.”

That is why returning home is such a double-edged dilemma. When you are abroad, you crave the security of “sameness” to support you as you experiment with the uncertain, template-free newness of being abroad – alone and unaccounted for.

However, when you do go back to Pakistan, the shock of the too much sustained on too little, of awkward, fragile angles – be they of buildings, people’s neeyats or the ludday-huay lorry’s on the roads — are all too much for your ‘self’ to fathom, and you find yourself gasping for want of control, a semblance of understanding and most of all – for an escape.

The frenzy of a country like ours can be mapped onto miniscule points on a line, looping unto each other in a knotted mess of black, knarled graphite strokes marring a tiny piece of white paper, shiny grey at best, leaving smudges all over your already clogged mind.

But having said that, The Harvest makes one realize that Pakistan as a whole, has changed, and continues to do so.

For one thing, new Pakistani music is the brilliant blue of a positive litmus test which proves that the attitude toward our music and those who partake in such delights – has shifted. But this is not a change that has happened overnight.

It’s stirrings began to be felt in people like Rushk and Abbas Ali Khan, these were then articulated more definitively by Sajid & Zeeshan their first time around, considered in places like Ali Azmat’s Social Circus, refreshed by the delectable dabs of Zeb & Haniya, stunningly evoked in the works of Mekaal Hasan and the furious, back-arching Overload, reaching an apotheosis of sorts in Coke Studio, and existing amongst the provocative (and highly underrated) fringes in the works of the internet dwelling Asfand, Poor Rich Boy, //orangenoise, Mole, Positive, Usman Riaz, Natasha Ejaz, Talal Qureshi and Zoe Viccaji.

This music, this new Pakistani music, stems from our own evolution.

We have grown from a need to internalize all that is external – an ambition tripping forward over it’s own eager feet. Instead, we now crave self-contained exploration, one which yearns to slow down and relish it’s pleasures and pains in a retrospection of yore. An introspection where simple pleasures take root and are held onto as the bigger picture crumbles or zooms out into a pixelated mess that we are soon unable to discern.

Even when comparing Sajid and Zeeshan’s previous album – One Light Year at Snail Speed – with the new one, you feel a change, or rather, you are aware of the changes within your self.

That’s why this new album is best heard when one is on their own. I’m not saying listen to it in solitary confinement — well not the physical variety, anyway.

I am talking about listening to it in the lonely places where we live in our own minds, amongst a bheer of beeples in a waiting area, during our daily commute, whilst roaming aimlessly in the transits of our life. I am talking about the time one finds themselves caught in a transition, the way one waits for The (aptly named) Harvest.

Music of this kind, which builds itself in the times we discount from ‘the measure of productivity’ of the day, the times when we just take a deep breath to brace ourselves with all we’ve gone through thus far, and let it out in the thandi saans spaces of now. ‘The Harvest’ lets us exist in a place where as Plato – the failed wrestler – wistfully noted, “everything is becoming, nothing is.”

There is a tired refrain in the criticism being faced by new Pakistani music that other luminaries around the world have done such sort of songs and albums before. But while Kraftwerk, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, and countless others may have used such digitization to portray the musical agenda of their times, Sajid and Zeeshan, like other new Pakistani music manage to colour in ‘our own’ musical narrative. They have, within their own time, betrayed a crystallized clarity, a need for white noise, a need for escape which is not seeking denial but actualization.

Of course, the album is not without its flaws. There are moments where the lyrics feel dated, or the music does not feel it has settled in its new form, or hasn’t shed enough of it’s previous incarnation in the first album.

But those flaws are apparent in light of the album’s most rewarding facet – the audacious yet carefully constructed, and somehow comfortably positioned transitions. The end of each song goes hand in hand with the next one’s continuity so beautifully in this album, that the stitching together of songs effortlessly sweeps you off your feet without forcing you to feel any-which-way, except to explore your own musings. And listening to Sajid’s clear voice – tone and tenor – you chew your intellectual cud like a cow does: in slo-mo ruminations.

Sajid & Zeeshan are themselves artists whose work marks the ‘change’ in Pakistani music that we keep searching for, but not seeing. Theirs is a farq which we older types can relate to and yet accept as an evolution to internalise. And perhaps their in-between nature is what allows them the insight into the importance of continuity, of a patchwork seamlessly sewn into our consciousness afore, yet one harkening a newly, quilted whole.

Pakistani English Music Industry Album Reviews