Finding beauty in the hidden life of longing

It’s less of a word than a signal of longing, or anticipation even, holding its own weight of meaning through centuries of South Asian writing and song (sometimes written as rim-jhim or rum-jhum), often in the context of romance and devotion.

Break it down further and jhoom on its own can mean to move or sway with joy, like long grass in answer to a cooling monsoon breeze or a lover lost in a daydream. The room part, meanwhile, is mostly there for emphasis, like clip is to clop or flam is to flim – a grammar quirk called reduplication – but could be seen to mean a physical place or interior world, something we can enter and even inhabit. 

That’s technically a mistranslation, but it feels true on an intuitive level when it comes to Ali Sethi and Gregory Rogove’s recent LP that takes the onomatopoeia as its name. What I get out of Room Jhoom is an album that seems built almost wholly out of thresholds, or the idea of “radical waiting” as Sethi puts it – not really choosing between one state or another but hanging out and soaking in the fertile ground between them, a middle place where identities once held at a distance start to blur.

In this specific place, the melodic ideas of folk absorb the breath and space of ambient just as Rogove’s electronics take on the patience of ragas, collapsing history and longitudes into a singular, suspended present, a time and space where phrases loop instinctively, returning to familiar refrains with different modulations until they start to take on new contours and colours of meaning, “transformed into something that takes it far away from its provenance or intended effect.” “It's a kind of magic,” Sethi says. “Our world is obsessed with novelty and invention, but repetition is a no less powerful tool for discovery and reflection.”

The intentionality with which Room Jhoom’s eight songs move also mirrors, in a way, Sethi’s own path as an artist, three albums into a globally successful career. For him, singing has never been just a vehicle for emotion but an exercise in map-making too, tracing “curves and peaks and troughs” across a landscape that’s felt rather than seen. It’s intellectual as much as it is intuitive, but also very physical, in terms of a demand for technical control that borders on heroic. He jokes that it’s “a diva sport,” but you know that he’s dead serious too, crediting his background as a writer and “aspiring litterateur” for locking in a practice of critical thought that shapes everything he does. 

“Music is not a thoughtless act,” he adds, echoing conductor Daniel Barenboim’s guiding idea that “music is a way of thinking,” and seasoned player Rogove (Devendra Banhart, Megapuss) comes to much the same point from a slightly different direction. Having immersed himself in Hindustani classical music as an 18-year-old college kid from Pennsylvania on a year-abroad study programme in Mumbai, he came to understand that it was not a system to be mastered but a whole universe of microscopic attention to detail, of which he could only hope to scratch the surface.

“The discipline and technique needed to truly excel in that tradition is supernatural,” he explains. “But it was enough to start hearing and understanding things differently, and that in and of itself was the greatest gift and, without a doubt, completely changed my mind and my ears forever.”

If all this makes Room Jhoom sound overly cerebral, or like one long calculation, believe me when I say that the beauty of this record is that all this careful thinking doesn’t weigh it down in the slightest. The depth of thought behind it is felt from the roots up rather than something that just lurks above the music, shaping the songs from within rather than steering them to grow in a particular direction. 

Sethi and Rogove themselves describe the making of Room Jhoom in botanical terms, referring to the process as a “mutual flowering” that bloomed out of a very different approach – something closer to Sethi’s global 2022 hit “Pasoori”, a multicultural confession on a dancefloor with its reggaeton pulse, Punjabi folk roots, Turkish bağlama, and electronic percussion.

“We went from trying to make dance-y, exciting music to something quiet, subtle, and almost monkish,” says Rogove. “But that’s where we found the most powerful feelings. That’s where Ali’s voice reached an exalted form as an instrument. That’s where we fully connected with each other, and hopefully that’s where we can connect with everyone who listens.”

That’s a lot of ‘where’s, but it brings us back to the thought of Room Jhoom as a place, or a series of thresholds, where not knowing becomes part of the experience of knowing, and, in a way, its own form of arrival. As a self-imposed exile from Pakistan since coming out as queer, post-“Pasoori”, NYC-based Sethi knows only too well that sometimes the most meaningful spaces are ones we can’t fully enter or leave, and what he calls “radical waiting” is inextricable from that. Room Jhoom arguably finds its deepest expression in suspended possibility. Or, to put it more bluntly, the yearning is the point. 

“I think Room Jhoom tries to allow absence and yearning to exist as they are,” Rogove tells me. “It doesn’t try to change them, even in the face of discomfort.”

The idea of longing as something that can be generative and not just exquisitely painful is one that’s central to the birahini mode of performance that Sethi loves to explore. Boiled all the way down, it could be described as men singing from the narrative perspective of women, but that sort of overlooks the deeper transformation at work, where performers can feel free of the limits of identity in a way that’s less about presenting as it is about shifting emotional positions.

“The birahini mode is about surrender, to the elements and to the tug of passion,” he explains. “For a woman, or a performer voicing a woman, this is considered properly subversive in a patriarchal society. I guess that’s why the Indian poets marshalled it in the first place, because it allows the society to have a collective, cathartic reckoning with all that it otherwise considers transgressive and shameful.”

The enduring appeal of the birahini mode, then, is that it can function as a vessel through which a voice that appears to belong to just one person can hold the feelings and experience of many. By singing from the storylines of women, men could communicate what direct speech would never stand for, and clever use of metaphor can of course pull off a similar trick, allowing a truth, left unexplicit, to travel so much further.

That, Sethi says, was the “great triumph” of “Pasoori”, a billion-plus streaming feat of indirection that refused to pin itself to any one context or meaning. We can gather that there’s distance, there’s certainly longing, and that something’s been left unresolved, but we’re never told exactly what’s been lost and why it’s never coming back. “It’s a strangely elusive scenario that everyone can relate to,” he adds, explaining how harnessing metaphor as an “anciently potent form of resistance […] slips past the barriers erected by bullies and fascists.”

The forest landscapes that recur in Indian miniature paintings extend a similar imaginative gesture, drawing out stories of secret trysts and lingering anticipation that unfold beyond the reach and repercussions of severely prejudiced structures. Sure, who doesn’t love getting back to nature, but the symbolism of the forest goes way beyond renewal, as Sethi explains: “It’s a metaphor for a far-off place, a mysterious middle ground, away from the noise of the normative society, a place of romance and wonder.”

“It’s the opposite of the American ‘woods’ where evil tends to lurk,” he adds, teasingly. “It’s where you go to discover yourself, whether for ascetic or erotic reasons.”

In that context, then, the point of the forest in the paintings is not that lovers meet there but that underneath the canopy different rules apply. Ordinary time begins to stretch and lose its grip, perhaps, and waiting takes the shape of a dedicated practice that acquires its own momentum of want. 

"When you long for something, you perceive it much more vividly than when you have or possess it,” Sethi reflects. “Longing is a pathway to transcendence. So is exile, which is a state of separation."

The idea of transcendence here, with the implication that distance can become a doorway if you wait it out for long enough, feels especially appropriate for Room Jhoom and its embrace of repetition as a form of discovery. That is, after all, how Sethi himself describes learning, or “imbibing,” Hindustani classical music as the student of a guru who could sing the same phrases over and over with inflections that he’d try to imitate, “hopelessly in the early years,” he says.

“He was showing me the infinite variety that is contained within a single melodic phrase. That by stretching a note this way, or embellishing a line with a trill, you could completely transform the experience of listening. This is the Sufi ethos too, infinity as a pathway to the One.”

Rogove, meanwhile, seems to view things from a more psychological angle, suggesting that repetition works because it gradually loosens up the way our brains wire meaning, and that once we’re taken out of our usual, rational headspace, repetition “can start to warp aspects of reality.” Repetitive thoughts, like longing for example, “start to become an object in and of themselves,” he adds. The something or someone you once desired can fade into the background, “yet the longing itself, the experience of longing, becomes the thing you think you need.”

That’s precisely the point when the magic Sethi mentioned earlier begins, when words and old wants begin to shed away and phrases are freed from their stiff old clothes of meaning, revealing over and over new sounds within the sound. It’s another way of looking at birahini too, in the sense that freedom doesn’t always mean to leave something behind, it can come from stepping so completely into a mode that it starts to expand everything around you.

Singing in this way, Sethi says, reminds him that freedom is “neither a modern nor a Western invention” but something that can come from changing our relationship to what we carry, allowing even the hardest things to grow into sources of beauty, and Room Jhoom's patient songs, its “romantic rebellion,” do exactly that.

“When life gives you thorns, you turn them into flowers,” he concludes. “And when it gives you flowers, you keep them.”