Persian Psychedelia: Haale

WESTERN POP ARTISTS have long looked to the East for inspiration, from The Beatles making a pilgrimage to India and absorbing drones and sitars in the 1960s, to 1990s indie rockers Macha sojourning to Indonesia and returning with a gamelan-rock hybrid.

But New York City singer-songwriter Haale doesn't just gaze East and cherry-pick its music to dress up her own folk-rock songs. She's a U.S.-born Iranian-American who also draws on the Persian music she grew up listening to from her parents, who moved here in 1974.

Haale's bewitching Sufi-steeped trance rock can be heard on her recent debut releases, two five-song CD EPs: "Morning" and "Paratrooper," both self-released on her own Darya label.

"I want to record and release music continuously, and the EP format is better suited to that," Haale replied when asked why she made the unusual choice to release two EPs rather than a single CD. "You don't have to make a big deal about releasing one CD once every two years. You can release continuously.

"The song division is another reason I decided to release these 10 songs as separate things," she continued. "They're different chapters in the work — and there are extensions of each of those chapters that haven't been released yet. We'll probably release another two EPs. 'Morning' is mostly [sung in] Persian [primarily using the words of mystic poets Rumi and Bahar]. And 'Paratrooper' is mostly [sung in] English, and they're mirror images of each other."

That mirroring is explicit not just in the EPs' music but also on their back cover art. While the front of the CD covers feature black and white photos — "Morning" has a lovely shot of a mother's henna-tattooed hands holding her child's; "Paratrooper" has an evocative close-up of the extremely photogenic Haale — the back covers feature simple designs with the same font and Perso-Arabic script. The only difference is that the background of "Morning" is black and that of "Paratroopers" is white.

The EPs came out this past January, just before Haale's appearance at a David Byrne-curated concert at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall. Haale's performance received props from the New York Times, and her EPs have garnered some buzz, but she's anything but an overnight success.

In fact, the 33-year-old singer is a bit of a late bloomer.

"It took me a while to find my sound, and feel comfortable in it," Haale said.

"One of the reasons I didn't peak early is I was studying [biology] at Stanford — and not really enjoying it," she said, laughing. "I was being very out of touch with my own feelings about things, being on automatic pilot. But finally those real impulses inside said, 'I've had enough. Let's get to the point here.'"

A friend gave Haale a guitar in 1996 and she taught herself how to play. "I was writing kind of folk and rock songs," she said, not really in touch with the Persian roots that would inform her later work. "But when I started translating some of the poetry of one of the mystical poets — because I was getting inside the language in a way I never had before — I decided I'd like to start singing in [Persian]. So it was 6 or 7 years ago that I first started singing in the language." (She also now studies with a Persian voice coach.)

Haale earned her MFA in poetry from City College of New York. With her return to New York she started meeting the musicians — such as guitarist Dougie Bowne, who produced the EPs — who would eventually help her realize her dream of mixing the '60s psychedelic rock and folk she loved with the hypnotic sounds of Persia.

"I'm coming into a sort of rhythm with writing," she said. "I feel like I'm busting into new realms of prolificness. I'm not the sort of artist who had my creative peak when I was 16 or 22 or something. I'm definitely on an upward slope of getting in touch with my creative way."

» Black Cat, 1811 14th St. NW; with Anousheh Khalili, Wed., 8 p.m., $12; 202-397-7328. (U St.-Cardozo)

Photos courtesy Haale