There’s a long, often overlooked history of exchange between Indonesia and the Arab world, one that moves through trade routes, religious traditions, and, just as quietly, music. Tirakat, the new collaboration between Jakarta trio Ali and Lebanese composer and multi-instrumentalist Charif Megarbane, doesn’t attempt to explain that history. It simply inhabits it.
Ali’s sound has always drawn from a dense lineage—1970s Indonesian psychedelic funk, Melayu traditions, disco rhythms, and traces of Middle Eastern melody woven into hypnotic grooves. Megarbane, whose work often drifts across imagined geographies, meets them on familiar ground. What emerges isn’t a “fusion” record in the conventional sense, but something more lived-in—a shared language rather than a negotiated one.
The music resists the urge to point at its influences. Melodic lines slip between scales without announcement. Rhythms feel both locked-in and drifting, shaped less by genre than by feel. Western instruments—guitars, bass, keys—are played through regional sensibilities, bending toward something that feels inherited rather than assembled.
At the center of the record is the process. The title Tirakat refers to a Javanese spiritual practice rooted in discipline, patience, and devotion, itself derived from the Arabic tariqa, meaning “path” or “method.” It’s a concept that runs through the album’s structure: repetition as meditation, groove as a kind of study, collaboration as a slow unfolding rather than a fixed outcome.
That ethos is what gives Tirakat its weight. It feels contemporary in its looseness, but anchored in something older—circulations of sound that predate genre, geography, or industry framing. The result is a record that doesn’t try to bridge cultures so much as reveal they were never entirely separate to begin with.
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