You will seldom find an artist who scoffs at the idea of serendipity. The idea that a happy coincidence can provide insight or inspiration might be seen as undermining the artist’s own creative abilities. It seems to imply that rather than their own talent, it was dumb luck that provided the spark or solution that their work was searching for.

Yet those who go through the creative process are often aware of how a quirk of fate is many times the best way of allowing one to move past an impasse. Many go further than calling this merely serendipity, and point to divine or otherworldly inspiration instead.

A little while back, two Pakistani cousins who both happened to be musicians and worked in the financial sector, met in London. Naturally, they picked up a couple of guitars and started jamming. They had played in bands before but the inspiration that was coming from that meeting was like nothing either had felt before.

The inspiration to create soul-stirring music can come from a stroll in a souk, a metaphor in a poem or even a sticker on a car!

It was that day that Umair Dar and Talha Alvie decided to start a band which was to become The D/A Method — a look at our two protagonists’ last names gives a clue to the origin of the band’s name. 

Soon after, Umair lost his job, got divorced, and decided to move back to Pakistan. A friend suggested that he read a book called The 40 Rules of Love, which re-imagines the story of Maulana Rumi and Shams al-Tabraiz.

For those unaware of the context, Rumi was a fairly orthodox cleric until he met a man called Shams, who completely changed his life. The two were together for a brief but intense period, before Shams was allegedly murdered. Meeting and then losing Shams caused an outpouring of lyrical poetry from Rumi, and it was these that turned him into the legendary mystical poet known to the world today.

The EP is a statement on the conflict-strewn reality of Pakistan today, and addresses the role of religion in both fermenting this situation, and providing a way out. The title and opening track, Janissaries, refers to the historical phenomenon of the slave-soldiers in the Ottoman Empire.

As Umair began to read the book, he began to think of creating a song called Dervish, the name given to those who followed Rumi’s mystical order. It was a rare moment of elation in what had been a difficult time. He called up Talha, who was on a vacation in Egypt at that time and had spent the day roaming Cairo’s ancient, famed souks. As soon as the call began, Talha interrupted Umair to tell him about his day in those bazaars marinated in time, and confessed that he had thought of writing a song called Dervish.

The coincidences didn’t end there. Umair has a picture of a car he saw the next day, which had a large red sticker on its rear window — ‘Darvaish’. Soon, he seemed to be coming across the word in Facebook statuses and newspaper articles, and he knew that he had found a path to follow.

It was moments like these which punctuated the next two years as the band added two members, Usama on vocals and Istvan on drums, and completed writing and recording their debut album entitled The Great Disillusion. It was a massive undertaking — a 12-song concept album broken up into three parts, each with its own theme, all circling around the idea of disillusionment and the possibility of redemption.

The album is now complete, but while the band works out the details of its release and distribution, they wanted to provide a preview to the sound. Thus came the idea for the Janissaries EP: a 20-minute EP featuring one of the primary tracks of the album and two bonus tracks.

The EP is a statement on the conflict-strewn reality of Pakistan today, and addresses the role of religion in both fermenting this situation, and providing a way out. The title and opening track, Janissaries, refers to the historical phenomenon of the slave-soldiers in the Ottoman Empire. Briefly, this was a practice of enslaving young Anatolian and Balkan Christian boys and training them to become highly disciplined, elite soldiers. The analogy is with the thousands of similarly young children in our country today who find themselves being trained to kill for someone else’s agenda, and was something the two musicians had first encountered in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. 

Serendipity struck once more when the The D/A Method were recording the second track of the EP entitled Brave, a cover of Swedish metal outfit Katatonia. The band had begun recording with the renowned musician and producer Omran Shafique, and the former Coke Studio guitarist suggested that they work with a sarangi player. The suggestion turned out to be a stroke of genius, as the addition of the ancient stringed instrument added a depth and character to their complex, guitar-driven sounds. The band went on to incorporate the santoor in the EP’s third song, Alvida, and their music — which had already gotten attention as well as commercial interest in markets abroad — started to attain further distinctiveness.

The Janissaries EP is available online and the full-length album is due in the next few months. Despite the title, Umair and Talha are not quite completely disillusioned. There are plans to start a studio, and they are constantly looking for opportunities to revive live performances and greater participation with fans. Moreover, they remain more invested in the social impact of what their music represents, and not just in its styles or lyrics. The proceeds for the EP’s sales have been pledged to The Citizens’ Foundation (TCF) as part of education efforts in Pakistan.

Going through their earlier music and comparing it with what they are making now, The D/A Method’s journey appears logical. Pakistani fusion music, which has been around for two decades now, has been continuously evolving, and there is a far more mature idiom to the collaborations that take place today. The band’s musicianship was definitely evolved enough to bring on these new sounds and accommodate them in a context which worked. Moreover, the genre of prog allows for such high concepts and ideas to be fitted in quite seamlessly. 

Yet while the conditions for this union had already existed, its inspiration came together as stroll in a souk, a metaphor in a poem, a sticker on a car. One can read too much, or too little, from such a coincidence, but perhaps it represents how art reveals itself to us as much as we create it, and if so, then it is easy to see this album is a revelation.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, March 1st, 2015

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