Imaad Wasif’s new album is Strange Hexes and his new band is Two Part Beast. The songs that came to form Strange Hexes were written during 2006 while Wasif was touring the world in support of his self-titled debut. From thought streams penned on scraps of paper and carried via coat pocket through painstaking revisions and airport metal detectors, to melodies that floated unsuspectingly through hotel windows after midnight – interlacing themselves with the ubiquitous drones of an electronic tamboura – the narrator is a devotee of Barthes’ Lover’s Discourse and obsessed with the testament to vigilance and volatility in love, yet in a curious twist, he seems to be writing within the deranged emotional scope of a schizophrenic androgyne. He/She inhabits both sexes and perspectives at all times, channeling romantics Baudelaire and Rimbaud by way of speed freak fags Bowie, Reed, Bolan and Iggy and seen through the eyes of surrealists Dali and Buñuel. The lyrical fragmentation we encounter here is akin to the absurdist methodology found in Alfred Jarry’s Visits of Love.

So just exactly who is this crazed outpatient, this lover, this recluse, this megalomaniac, this weirdo, this elusive puss-in-boots, this paranoid, this self-saboteur, this true believer? Can he live up to the calling of his name, which means “pillar of faith” in Urdu? To try to answer these questions we may consult the oracle of Strange Hexes, or perhaps take a glimpse inside the record’s unreleased companion piece, a collection of aphorisms and ciphers titled Letters of a Suicide Profiteer that Wasif hopes will surface one day. In an excerpt from the introduction of Letters, he writes, “…for I have committed no wrongdoing but to be weakened by my intoxications and clouded at times so much so that I am misled and come undone…there is no relief…there is nothing to say that could be more powerful than the pure words, the simple ones that haunt me…I need the electricity to shock – I need to be jilted. I am no good, I feel no good…to be lost in the cacophonous swells of love…to think no more of myself and my needs, if such a freedom could be granted then I know of such a heaven as foretold in the scriptures.” Wasif believes that he is not creating music, but a different form altogether, a sound for everyone’s ears and no one’s ears. “What the fuck does that mean?” you may ask. If you listen closely to Strange Hexes, then you will understand.