Mohamed Assani - Wayfinder (2020)

Wayfinder is an act of gathering and discovery. It is the story of a musician-explorer who has journeyed the world and now has come home to empty his pockets and share his treasures.

Contemporary Polynesians refer to Wayfinders as the ‘astronauts of our ancestors’. These navigators found their way by watching celestial bodies, listening to winds, feeling the swell of waves slapping on the hull of the canoe. They tried to be like birds, because birds always have a relation with the edges of the horizon.

Musical traveller Mohamed Assani takes his sitar in a completely new and unexpected direction— bringing together unforeseen musical worlds in an original album that relentlessly pushes at the frontiers of cultural and musical hybridity. Using a refreshing, contemporary sound palette, Wayfinder incorporates a range of stylistic influences, including Indian/Pakistani Classical, Middle Eastern music, jazz, funk, Western harmony, ambient & electronic music and more. Both acoustic and electronic, it features sitar, tabla, mridangam, kanjira, mbira, voice and electronic sounds. It has been produced by Emmy and Juno-nominated music producer, Adham Shaikh.

This album of original music was created over many nights, between midnight and 5am, in the middle of the rainforest in the Kootenay Mountains of B.C., Canada. There were bears and cougars and other wildlife always close by and that wild atmosphere is captured in the music.