It has taken a long time since I got around to write about this track. I briefly mentioned it in my post Ethnic Chillout meet Disco Music: Sina ft. Bahramji & Mashti in 2012, when I released a second remix featuring Bahramji and Mashti. So it wasn’t until I released the second track that I mentioned Soul Awareness.

Here is a short introduction to Bahramji from his website:

Bahram (Bahramji) was born in 1952 in the Kurdish city of Kermanshah in Persia. As a child he heard the ancient Sufi melodies, which are the inspiration for his music today. At the age of 13 he learned to play the Santoor and started to perform at several places in his hometown. Through playing whirling music for wanderers from different cultures, his style has changed from the traditional approach to his own. He melts old songs into a new form, creating a meditative sphere to uplift body and soul.

I was inspired to incorporate some samples from his tracks, and the album Sufiyan [Blue Flame Records, 2009] was the culmination of spiritual and poetic music in the world of chillout and meditative music. Deriving its roots from Persian poets such as Rumi, Hafez and Saadi, the mystical renditions of the poetry was reflected in beautifully arranged songs that portrayed the mysticism surrounding Sufism, and the one notion of monotheistic beliefs. To draw parallels with Western music, Madonna’s song “Bedtime Story” (released in 1995, written by Björk et al.) has a similar lyrical and graphical inspiration drawn from Sufism.