“Exotic locales” in “far and dangerous places” are not new muses for musicians from the West. Although most of my own iTunes playlists consist of music and musicians from around the world - fitting into the too broad “world music” category - I am always wary of such collaborations and how they represent the muse/country in question, and of how these musical encounters can turn into self-indulgent congratulatory efforts for the recording artist. Peter Gabriel is an obvious reminder of finding his transfromed musical side through West African musical traditions, and the French artist Manu Chao is a favorite of hippie dance parties around the world. A new collaboration comes from Swedish songstress Victoria Bergsman, lead singer of The Concretes and famous for lending her soft, feminine voice to indie darlings Peter Bjorn and John. For her latest project, Bergsman travels to Pakistan with producer/guitarist/engineer Andreas Soderstrom to record her solo album “East of Eden”.

The softspoken songstress expressed her desire to travel to Pakistan having found inspiration in Sufi Music, and the late musician Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who was no stranger to collaborations with international artists in the early 1990’s. She tells MTV Iggy that the experience was challenging in more ways than one, and seems a little flustered at the traditionally improvisational nature of musical recording of artists in the country:

“It was very emotionally difficult to cope with the country’s differences,” but “When you take the music into a studio I believe the creativity and the playfulness of the studio often gets lost. But I decided I wanted to go somewhere and preferably very far away…And also I was listening a lot to Asian music especially from India and Pakistan… I felt like I wanted to go there and see how my music would interact with the Asian music and their tunes.”

[Bergsman and Soderstrom] set up a makeshift studio in the Lahore home of their hotel owner. According to the duo’s press materials, the electricity would go off for an hour every third hour. That was the least of their problems. Bergsman and Soderstrom had to pretend to be married in the traditionally patriarchal society. She also had to convince the local musicians that a woman could run a recording session. She apparently did: The melodies produced by Pakistani wind instruments and the rhythms of the drummers weave through Bergsman’s words and Soderstrom’s acoustic guitar as if all of the musicians were a working band.

Below you can watch a National Geographic produced documentary coinciding with Bergman’s experience in Pakistan. Although reflective, she evokes some problematic imagery through emphasizing the “crowded”, “loud” and “miserable/dirty/poor” scenes she saw. In addition to this narrow portrayal, she fails to provide an introduction to the other musicians she works with. And while musical trips into the cultural capital of Lahore are not a new phenomenon, she alludes to her European peers lauding her “bravery” and “difficult emotional decision” to travel into Pakistan, where she is shown completely covered and without any other woman in sight - a one-dimensional view of the society. Further, as Sepia Mutiny points out, she perhaps could have tried harder to find female collaborators as she had intended. I find it hard to believe that these musicians “don’t live in Pakistan” anymore as implied in the documentary.