Persian Psychedelia: Haale

I'll be the first to admit that my musical preferences often seem to be stuck in the years prior to 1994 or so, but luckily I'm getting caught up on missed time. Even still, however, I tend to be woefully ignorant about new music and artists. However, earlier this year, Haale caught my ear and my imagination. She's been described as "a combination of Jim Morrison, Nico, Edith Piaf, and Salma Hayek" --"Born in New York City to Iranian parents, Haale grew up with Jimi Hendrix in one ear and Persian music in the other. Her distinctive style and incendiary live shows draw on '60s psychedelic rock and traditional Sufi music.Whether singing her own lyrics in English or those of mystical Iranian poets like Rumi in Persian, Haale's cinematic, collaged texts are woven through a trance-inducing tapestry of shimmering electric guitars, strings and percussion."In Sufi tradition," she says, "music is a tool for ushering listeners into a transcendent state, for turning them on, awakening their souls, propelling them into an ecstatic state. I think great psychedelic rock does this as well. There's definitely a kinship in the level of energy and fire that's in these two genres, and in where that can take the listener ... That's what I am interested in."This High, the first track I heard from her work, is the most mellow of the bunch on her Paratrooper EP (and the least psychedelic). Perhaps later today I'll put up something that leans more toward Hendrix, but for my own idiosyncratic mix of reasons (beyond an affinity for trance-induced tapestries of shimmering things) I quite love this.