Michael Brook » Works » Duo » Michael Brook & Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: Mustt Mustt

Mustt Mustt (1990, 4AD) Mustt Mustt Nothing Without You (Tery Bina) Tracery The Game Taa Deem Sea Of Vapours Fault Lines Tana Dery Na Shadow Avenue Mustt Mustt (Massive Attack Remix)

Michael’s first collaboration became an early benchmark of the then-burgeoning world music genre; the sessions for Mustt Mustt found Brook adopting new approaches to studio recording. Putting Michael together with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the foremost exponent of the Pakistani devotional singing known as qawwal, was initially the idea of Peter Gabriel, at whose Real World studio facility the sessions took place. With David Bottrill engineering, Michael embarked on an intensive four day session with Nusrat, the pair learning how to collaborate in spite of each man’s inability to speak the other’s language.

Mustt Mustt, the ‘East meets West’ album that resulted, began to garner strong critical notices due in part to the inclusion of Massive Attack’s remix of the title track (the only single sung in Urdu to chart in the U.K., to that point in time). The album’s influence would continue to be felt during the ‘90s; its performances inspired the likes of Jeff Buckley, and its alloy of centuries-old songcraft and electronic texture pointed the way for later work by Talvin Singh and other producers of the U.K.’s Asian Underground movement.