The L.A.-based singer-songwriter Ariana Delawari's been fairly quiet since her 2009 full-length "Lion of Panjshir" (though her family's role in contemporary Afghan politics remains fascinating and turbulent). But the album and its long journey to completion is still yielding new material for her. Here, she premieres a lush new track, "Tree Hymn," that she began in the sessions for "Panjshir" but only recently finished with some local collaborators Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Carlos Nino. Her vision for sprawling, droning folk accented with Central Asian percussion gets her most full-realized production yet on it. 

Ariana Delawari: "Tree Hymn"

She also made her directorial debut recently with a striking video for "Panjshir's" centerpiece, the single "Be Gone Taliban," and is close to finishing her documentary film on a

Last year, I wrote a long profile on local singer-songwriter Ariana Delawari's hemisphere-spanning path to recording her solo debut alongside the L.A. indie demimonde and traditional musicians in her troubled ancestral home of Afghanistan. But outside of an unexpectedly noisy and raucous live set at the New Los Angeles Folk Festival and a video for her song "We Came Home," few shows and little new material surfaced in 2010.

Hopefully, this new remix of her track "Be Gone Taliban" from the percussion-mad producer Butchy Fuego indicates an even more interesting second wind this year. Fuego tears the droning original to ribbons and rebuilds it with cheap snare hits, jaundiced electro groans and vocal sampling that makes Delawari sound like she's reading a dream diary through a fuzzy wiretap. M.I.A. may be hawking her "ViCKi LEEKX" mixtape, but this is an on-the-record document of another politically volatile artist thriving in a radical update of her sound.

-- August Brown

Photo: Ariana Delawari. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

In 2007, the Silver Lake singer-songwriter Ariana Delawari traveled to her parents' home in Kabul to record parts of her debut album, "Lion of Panjshir," as Afghanistan was under fire from Taliban-sympathizing suicide bombers. Under the watch of armed guards, she played her brand of California folk-rock with local masters of Afghan instruments, and found an unlikely helping hand from director David Lynch in mixing the record, which came out in October on Lynch's label. Read the full story, today's Column One, at this link.

-- August Brown

Photo by Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times