Expect no resolution. Submerge yourself in the crooks of your body. Observe the peaks and the valleys, the softness and the rough parts. And then you will see: the body is everything.
Ahana’s adeptness at persuasion is the first thing that will strike you upon listening to her debut album, Soma. (Soma, meaning the body as a distinct entity from the soul.) She takes her time to be impactful and cogent, singing slow and soft and serene, beguiling you like a slow-acting kind of magic trick that is unraveling before your eyes.
From the first song, ‘ILMBIAS,’ she plants the seeds of her argument about the body being the centerpiece of life by depicting her memories as places she left her body inside of in the past. Memories are just settings for a past iteration of your body, according to Ahana. There are summits and pitfalls in her vocals, and the muffled instrumentation allows for more of a focus on those vocals. “I had my body very wrong…,” she cries, which could mean that she took care of her body the wrong way or that she understood her body erroneously. This alleges that Ahana is discovering her own argument about the body, alongside explaining it to you throughout the album. The album is not an epiphany; it is an exploration.
On songs like ‘Ego’ and ‘A Word,’ she maintains that “I’ve got an ego and I’m glad that she is mine,” conflating her ego with her pride and “what lives should rot,” is what comes on the next song immediately after that lyric which corroborates that she thinks ego death is a good thing because it makes the ego “softer and more forgiving / Of the fact that she is living.” And what lives will eventually rot is what you find out on the next song. This marks this album as a coming-of-age, coming-into-yourself kind of record.
“How kind the body that bleeds as slowly as it can,” she says on ‘A Word,’ which is an indication that she believes our bodies try their best to keep us alive; the rest of the effort falls on us. Perhaps that is why the guitar plucking is so sporadic on this song. Do not blame the body for dying; it is just doing as we have always been told: what lives should rot.
On ‘In the Air,’ she references Hide and Seek and appropriately, her vocals and the guitar duck in and out of earshot coyly, like they are hiding and being found over and over again. The song sounds like a chant that pleads with the world to wrest its whimsy back. “Nothing has a name,” she says after saying that a game by any other name is still a game, a twist on the classic Shakespeare line from Romeo and Juliet. What matters is the essence, the meaning that you have assigned a word to, not the actual word that you have assigned to it.
“I could feel it in the air / So aware, so aware,” she mourns her old ability to be more attuned to the world with her body and soul at the same time. When she was fabricating fantasies, she was more aware of the world around her that was wrapped in reality.
‘Paresis’ is a word for partial paralysis. “Miles and miles between my core and voice box,” Ahana admits, saying that what reaches you through the songs about what is going on inside of her has gone through a slew of organs that have twisted it. “Do I speak true / Do I even need to,” she asks, questioning the importance of veracity when it comes to her feelings, fickle things that have already changed by the time they are expressed. It is impossible to be as honest as you want about anything. “I need to talk to my body parts,’ is the crux of the album in one line. Communicate with your body without the barrier of thought. Or second thoughts.
‘Soul Seamstress’ is a song inviting you to embrace yourself, all parts of you. Nothing about or inside of your body is mutually exclusive, which is why the instrumentation on all of these songs is so congruous with the vocals. They are in harmony. The body (the voice) and the soul (the music).
‘Singing Bowl’ is the most seminal song on the record, and it is exactly smack in the middle of it. With Tommy Khosla on Sitar and Nirmal Chohan on Tabla, the song harkens back to Ahana’s ancestry. It includes lines in Sanskrit: “Om paramaatmane nama hatha,” which translates to “My humble salutation to the one who is the Supreme Soul,” which is significant because this is where the soul joins the conversation that you were previously witnessing that solely included the body. “I did believe / In more than the world / But I have found more to it than more than it,” she admits, which indicates that she now believes the world is much more enormous and expansive, and profound than she previously though,t and that maybe there does not need to be more than the world since it is already so vast.
‘Language,’ ‘All My Water,’ and ‘Bold Song’ are all songs that rehash the point of meaning being superior to words and language. “I feel just like water / With one way to go / And everywhere to go,” she says on ‘All My Water,’ denoting that water can only flow in one direction, but it can reach anywhere it wants and find its way into anything. This is in conversation with the title of ‘Singing Bowl,’ in which she refers to herself as a singing bowl. She is both the bowl and the water. The shape and the contents. The body and the soul.
“I just learned to be a daughter,” she says on ‘The Fret,’ a confession that cements this as a coming-of-age album, a discovery of the self.
And finally, on ‘Drupe,’ a piano ballad, she wraps up the expedition she took you through. “There’s an old way of seeing the forest / And I am new to it, to being the forest,” she is not yet used to looking at herself in this new lens she is prescribing, not a gathering of trees, but a forest. “I am an ancestor, too,” she repeats, implying that she already sees herself as the past, rapidly changing, leaving this for posterity: “Someone left songs in their body for me / And I’m leaving songs in this body for you.”
It is unclear if she is referring to the body of work or her own body, but does it matter when they are now one and the same?
Written by Leo August
