Ami Dang fuses sitar, voice, and electronics to create east-meets-west, ambient/trance music. On the all-instrumental album Parted Plains, she draws inspiration from South Asian and Middle Eastern folktales, specifically, the four tragic romances of Punjab, Sohni Mahiwal, Sassi Punnun, Heer Ranjha, and Mirza Sahiba; Flora Annie Steel’s Tales of the Punjab: Folklore of India, and selected stories from One Thousand and One Nights. Galvanized by the Western interpretations of these stories, Parted Plains unfolds as a new sort of soundtrack for a yet-to-be written folktale that is neither Eastern nor Western, not traditional or contemporary – but somewhere in between.
