There’s a thread running through today — you heard it this morning with Cheb i Sabbah, that particular feeling of devotional music that’s been carefully opened up for Western ears without losing the thing that made it sacred in the first place. Mustt Mustt is the other end of that thread.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan had been the undisputed master of qawwali for twenty years by the time Peter Gabriel got to him. Real World Records — Gabriel’s label, his studio outside Bath — had been built for exactly this kind of encounter: the idea that you could put a microphone in the right room and let something ancient breathe without suffocating it in production. The 1990 sessions at Real World Studios in Box, Wiltshire were that premise put to the test in the most demanding possible way.
The Voice
Nusrat’s voice is genuinely difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t heard it. It does things that voices aren’t supposed to do — holds a note until you forget it started, then bends it somewhere you didn’t know was available, then releases it with an almost physical force. He was fifty kilos overweight and could outrun any musician in the room from a standing start. The qawwali party that traveled with him — his nephews, the harmonium players, the handclap percussionists who function almost like a rhythm section holding down a groove while he departs into the upper atmosphere — all of it came to Wiltshire intact.
What engineer Mark Sheridan and the Real World team understood was that you don’t fix what isn’t broken. The ensemble sound is live and proximate. You can hear the room. The handclaps are present in a way that most Western recording would have buried in reverb or smoothed into something decorative — here they’re structural, load-bearing, the thing that makes the trance work.
What Peter Gabriel Did and Didn’t Do
Gabriel produced, but the word undersells the restraint involved. He brought in Michael Brook, the Canadian guitarist and producer who’d invented the infinite guitar — a sustain system that let him hold tones almost indefinitely — and whose atmospheric textures had already shaped records like The Unforgettable Fire territory. Brook’s additions to tracks like the title cut are present but you have to look for them, which is exactly right. He was providing the Western listener a handhold without repainting the room.
The title track became something else entirely when it was later remixed by Massive Attack for the Star Rise EP — that’s a different conversation — but the original album version is the one to start with. It’s the longest track, nearly eleven minutes, and it earns every one of them. The ensemble works the groove and Nusrat climbs above it and the whole thing locks into the kind of rhythmic trance that takes twenty minutes of a live performance to achieve and somehow arrives here in half the time.
Na Main Jogi Na Yaar is quieter, more devotional in the stripped sense, and it’s the one that stays with you two days later when you’re making coffee and you suddenly realize you’ve been humming something you don’t have words for.
The connection to what you heard this morning is real and worth tracing. Cheb i Sabbah was working a similar alchemist’s operation — taking North African and South Asian spiritual music and finding the frequency where ecstasy and accessibility intersect. The difference is Nusrat was already a titan before he walked into that room. He didn’t need the production to elevate him. The production just made him audible to people who didn’t know they’d been missing something this large.
Put this on when the house is quiet. Full volume isn’t the point — presence is. The handclaps will sit in the room with you.