The first album by Ekova, released in 1998 by Six Degrees Records.
Ekova manages to merge influences from Iran, France, Ireland, Africa, and India into something unique, using impulses from those musical traditions but without getting stuck in any of them. The singer, Dierdre Dubois-Haddab, sings in her own improvised language, and the two musicians Mehdi Haddab and Arach Khalatbari follow up with a just as inventive sound.
Dubois' nonsense language sounds almost Celtic in some songs, such as Starlight In Daden. In Sebrendita it has a slightly Arabic quality, although Dubois herself thinks of it as "somewhere between an old black man and an old Chinese woman."
In My Prime is a traditional Irish ballad, but although Dubois actually sings in English, the text remains ineffable. Sabura is a traditional text from North Iran.
The tracks are:
- Starlight In Daden (5:31)
- Chant Of Diem (0:59)
- Todosim (3:44)
- Temoine (5:51)
- Ditama (2:31)
- Sebrendita (3:48)
- Sabura (4:43)
- La Nef des Fous (2:38)
- Sister (3:05)
- In My Prime (3:32)
- Taksim (3:18)
- Helas And Reason (4:21)
- Venus And One (4:40)
Sources: http://www.sixdegreesrecords.com/artists/ekova/
and http://www.ekovaonline.com/index_.html.