interview with Mariam Zohra Durrani / taRka / Myrh

• chill memory
• i grew up in pakistan, and the most memorable time I can remember is hiking with my little brother and my parents in the Himalyan mountains.
• why i became a vocalist
• On the whole, I am a singer because it has become my friend from since I was young, the practice decompresses my feelings, unites my breathing and body, it helps me create a personalized ceremony to stand up for life, to celebrate life. I have always lived in a diverse context of music with good mix of traditional and fusion or experimental collections; I regularly listened to family members and community singers perform live at home, or my father humming at dinner time, rapping the beat on the table with his palm and fingers like it was a tabla. Once I developed my own collection of music humming was my radio on the go, it was my walkman - my iPod, but tunes and lyrics were improvised as I sang walking down the street or doing dishes - my biggest delight was to lead a melody from one song I knew to another and weaving in a bit of my own composition. I began to make my own songs from early on but never with music (I compensated for music I heard with… more humming), eventually i began to play the djembe casually and it would inspire me to chant out loud. It was a dozen years ago tho, that I finally put my singing to an instrumental or jamming with local musicians in parks or home gatherings. Two years ago I decided to post some of these jams to soundcloud and through the listenership there I found many musicians to work with and more opportunities toward the experimental. 
• Majority of my songs are my words and poems; I describe it as a meditation on a poem so when I sing the poetry transforms in the moment adapting to the instrumental’s tones, some words are kept some are not. I have a freestyle approach to create songs without much of a plan but some basic guidelines. Letting the moment inform the singing and the direction of the song. In general the content of all the songs move from a subjective voice and perspective, grounded in the politic, to an objective voice reaching out to the universal, the spirits. A critique of self and the world around her.
• what about my city?
• Vancouver is a beautiful city because of the trees and the ocean and mountains in particular and these forces of nature are a foundation to my lyrics and poetry. My exposure to the city’s music life has been through spontaneous and random happenings mostly in parks. Some of my songs are about the cities relationship with the indigenous communities native to Canada as well as the conditions of people living in poverty in ‘the downtown east-side’ area.
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