Iftekharul Anam

Iftekharul Anam was born on 19 January 1987. He is a flutist, composer, songwriter and producer, and describes his own repertoire as spanning Sufi, world, folk, classical, electronic, ambient and new age music — a list that says less about genre than about a refusal to stay in one.

What runs through it is Sufism. His music returns to themes of spiritual consciousness, and his own pages carry the words of Shams Tabrizi rather than his own: that heaven and hell are not in the future but present now, and that whenever we manage to love without expectations or calculations we are already in heaven.

The recent work is instrumental and unhurried — You Are Here, Yearning, Sky Remembers — flute lines over long ambient beds, made to be sat with. He works from New York.