Berlin-Based Wooly and the Uke Offers Unsettling Audio-Visual Release ‘Home’

Invoking surreal sound design elements and haunting indie-folk vocals, Berlin’s Wooly and the Uke aka Jannat Sohail teams up with Pakistani producer Zahra Paracha on the short but searing audio-visual release “Home.”

In her withered opening utterance, Wooly and the Uke starts with a spoken word portion (posing the question “Have you ever felt grief like a home?”) before Paracha’s ambient layers provide the bed for more wistful vocals. Paracha describes the track as “funeral music.” She adds in a statement, “[It’s] an indication of something dead or gone.”

Sohail says in her statement, “’Home’ is an ode to those who carry many homes within, shadowed by an invisible yet overshadowing burden of tyranny, secrecy, guilt, and loss. The visual journey is one that slips between fragility, imposed sensuality, isolation, and expulsion – until one is left vulnerable and naked for the world to examine in stillness.” In the video directed by Sohail, we see figures covered in black, enacting scenes of what could be upheaval, until they’re seen wearing white, followed by a sequence in which contact is made from under their concealments.

The song is part of her four-track These Days EP, releasing track by track through 2021. Forthcoming singles include “Same as You,” “Dangling” and “These Days.” In addition to Paracha, producers from different parts of the globe are part of Wooly and the Uke’s songs, including Mexico’s Santiago Narvaez, U.S.-based John Mark Nelson and Brazilian artist Joan Cid. Sohail, who was awarded the Goethe Talents Scholarship in Berlin last year, created Wooly and the Uke as a genre-fluid project in 2017, debuting with the song “Circus.” Last year, she had a striking, sleek audio-visual release called “Circle in a Circle.”

Watch the video for “Home” below.