Comments:
Now that more than half the boxes are unpacked, I have gotten used to what day I have to take out the garbage, and I have made a dozen or so essential repairs to our new suburban home, I have time to get down to business. So last night, after the kids and my wife were asleep, I set out to set-up my stereo system in the basement alongside the washer and dryer and my workshop—one of the manly amenities of moving to "Our Town." To my delightful surprise the acoustics of the cement foundation, concrete walls and low ceiling were marvelous and Nitin Sawhney's new album—Prophecy—was the perfect album to discover that with.

Now with the luxury of not having to worry about neighbors and vaulted space to spread out the surround-sound speakers, I realize how my former "cosmopolitan" life in my old Brooklyn apartment could have never afforded me the pleasure of hearing the many splendid details of violins, electronic percussion and exotic chanting voices. The mixing of Prophecy is ripe with sophisticated channel flips and equally suave layers of sound; track 3–Acquired Dreams—being an especially good sample of this. The following track, Nothing More, also employed this multidimensional art with ocean waves rolling over a woman's voice on top of the harmony of an acoustic guitar. Moonrise, track 5, presented something that I don't recall ever being done so well, the blending of two different foreign tongues with their typical instrumental accompaniment: Arabic and the soft beat of a Bedouin drum intertwined with lyrical Brazilian Portuguese and an acoustic guitar playing a samba rhythm. In tracks 6-8 Sawhney mixes in spoken word tracks, which work as long as you agree to have them serve as background music.

The rest of the album is as equally experimental and varied in form, the mere diversity itself strings the whole lot of different colored gems into one strand of poetic achievement. Kudos to Nitin Sawhney and his newest project —Prophecy.