Without Words

I've been hooked to a song for the past few weeks, so much so that it plays in my head in a McBeal-eque way. The song - "Starlight in Daden" by Ekova, is part of a compilation of World Music type songs on the Sounds of Milano Fashion CD that I got a while back. At first listen, one would think that it's an ancient African chant, with a hint of Celtic influence.

The song is a very upbeat and happy one - with really good headphones, you can feel the African drums, the sound of desert wind and you can almost imagine giraffes and elephants running across a prehistoric landscape. I liked it so much that I wanted to know what those lyrics meant.

Excerpts from a review:

Dierdre Dubois has taken a page from the Cocteau Twins book and created her own improvised language, a kind of multicultural glossolalia that is as mysterious as it is musical.

...

Astronomers have long remarked on the human eye's ability to see very faint stars in the sky - as long as you're not looking directly at them. There are hundreds of stars too dim to see if viewed head on, but with a slight turn of the head, they can be seen glittering in our peripheral vision, like magic. Ekova's music has a similar, illusory quality. It offers a hint of the Sahara, a glimpse of old Erin, but if you look closely, those sounds aren't really there.

So those words didn't mean anything. Which intrigues me even more.

I once heard a colleague mention that the Qur'an has a soul, and if read aloud with the proper tajweed (pronounciation and intonation), the soul is communicated. It conveys the wrath of God, and the joy in the promises of rewards in the Afterlife, irrespective of language - so that even the most illiterate among us can feel the message.