Award-winning collaborators Kefaya & Elaha Soroor return with I Ran & Ran (Leaving Crumbles) – Davidam, the latest preview of Our Freedoms Must Be Won – Azadi Kho Bigri, out July 17 via Radio International / Absolute.
In this FM PRO 10Q, they unpack how a traditional Hazara nursery rhyme became a song about displacement, survival, and collective awareness.
Water, wheat, bread, knowledge, and consciousness give the track its quiet political map, carried by a circular, subtly psychedelic pulse of guitar, drums, and synths.
After the Songlines Award-winning Songs of Our Mothers, this chapter feels rawer and more direct: folk memory, experimental texture, and resistance in motion.
For us, resistance is not only anger or confrontation. It is also tenderness, community, memory and celebration. Even in very difficult circumstances, people still sing, dance, fall in love, build friendships and care for each other.
Q1. I Ran & Ran (Leaving Crumbles) – Davidam begins with a traditional Hazara nursery rhyme. What made this song the right entry point for the next stage of Our Freedoms Must Be Won – Azadi Kho Bigri?
The song felt like a natural entry point because it holds something very simple but also very deep. It comes from a nursery rhyme, something passed down collectively through memory and repetition, but for us it also speaks about how awareness and understanding are formed over time. The album is very much about collective responsibility, freedom, displacement and survival, so beginning from something rooted in childhood and oral tradition felt important. There is innocence in it, but also a sense of continuity and transmission across generations.
Q2. The track uses repetition and movement as part of its emotional build. How did you reshape a nursery rhyme into something that carries political and collective meaning?
We didn’t want to force a political meaning onto the song. The repetition was already there in the structure of the rhyme itself. What interested us was how repetition can become hypnotic and transformative. The movement of the lyrics from water to wheat, bread, knowledge and consciousness started to feel like a cycle of growth, where collective knowledge is built slowly through lived experience and through relationships with others. Politically, that felt very relevant to us, especially in a time where people are constantly being isolated from one another.
Q3. The song moves through images of water, wheat, bread, knowledge, and consciousness. What does that progression reveal about how awareness is passed on?
For us, it reflects the idea that consciousness is not abstract or individual, but something material and collective. Water becomes wheat, wheat becomes bread, bread becomes knowledge. It suggests that awareness grows through shared labour, shared memory, and everyday life. We were interested in how something as simple as a children’s rhyme could contain an entire way of understanding how people learn from their environment and from each other.
Q4. The album speaks to Afghan and Hazara displacement without losing its musical warmth. How do you hold beauty and resistance in the same space?
For us, resistance is not only anger or confrontation. It is also tenderness, community, memory and celebration. Even in very difficult circumstances, people still sing, dance, fall in love, build friendships and care for each other. We never wanted the music to feel purely dark or hopeless. The warmth is part of the resistance itself. Holding onto beauty and humanity in violent or dehumanising systems is already a political act.
Q5. Following Songs of Our Mothers, what did you want Our Freedoms Must Be Won – Azadi Kho Bigri to open up that felt new for this collaboration?
This record moves into a much rawer and more direct sonic space. Songs of Our Mothers was deeply rooted in reinterpreting folk songs, while this album expands into post-punk, psychedelic rock, experimental electronics and more aggressive rhythmic structures. Politically, it is also more explicit. The album comes from a moment where we felt it was no longer possible to speak indirectly about war, displacement, authoritarianism and collective responsibility. We wanted the music itself to embody tension, urgency and resistance physically through sound.
Q6. Elaha, your vocal presence brings both intimacy and power to the project. How do you approach songs shaped by memory, identity, and political weight?
I try not to separate those things. Memory, identity and politics are all part of lived experience, especially coming from Afghanistan and as a Hazara woman. When I sing, I am not thinking about presenting a political idea intellectually. It is something emotional and embodied. I am more interested in honesty than perfection. Sometimes vulnerability can carry more strength than trying to sound powerful all the time.
Q7. Kefaya’s sound crosses folk, jazz, global traditions, and experimental textures. What keeps that blend grounded rather than feeling like fusion for its own sake?
For us, it comes from long-term study, collaboration and lived relationships with the traditions we work with. We are not interested in taking surface elements from different cultures and mixing them together randomly. A lot of us have spent years studying different musical systems seriously, particularly South Asian traditions and improvisational practices, while also being shaped by London’s migrant and diasporic realities. The music grows from those experiences naturally rather than from the idea of “fusion” as an aesthetic goal.
Q8. FM PRO TECH Q: On I Ran & Ran, guitar, drums, and synths create a rolling, almost psychedelic pulse. What production choices helped the track keep that sense of motion?
A lot of it came from repetition and restraint. The rhythm section keeps pushing forward in a circular way rather than building towards a conventional climax. The synths were layered to create a slightly unstable, dream-like texture around the groove, while the guitars move between melodic fragments and more textural roles. We wanted the whole track to feel like something continuously unfolding rather than resolving.
Q9. FM PRO TECH Q: When rebuilding traditional material for a contemporary album, how do you decide what to preserve, what to expand, and what to disrupt sonically?
Usually the emotional core is the most important thing to preserve. Sometimes that might be a melodic phrase, a rhythmic cycle, or simply the feeling carried by the lyrics and vocal delivery. From there, we allow ourselves freedom with arrangement, harmony, sound design and structure. We are not trying to recreate tradition faithfully, but to enter into a dialogue with it from the reality we live in now. That means allowing contemporary sounds, distortion, electronics and experimentation to exist alongside older forms without treating either as untouchable.
Q10. You will present the album live at The Lower Third in London on September 20. What do you want audiences to feel when this record moves from recording into the room?
We want it to feel collective and physical. A lot of the album is about tension, solidarity and shared experience, and live performance allows that to become something immediate between people in the room. We want audiences to feel the energy of the grooves and the emotional intensity of the songs, but also to feel connected to each other through the experience. Even though the themes can be heavy, there is also a strong sense of release, movement and hope in the music.
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