Khyoot, the fifth album by Belgian-Tunisian artist Jawhar, is the fruit of a period of renewal and a desire to return to a certain lightness and to that ‘complex simplicity’ of keeping, both in performance and in recording, the same thrill you feel when a song is born.

Khyoot is the Arabic plural of ‘kheet’, meaning thread, fine rope, filament, string… In the more poetic context of the songs on the album, the word ‘khyoot’ is often used to refer to the links with what lies behind the visible, filaments that cross space and connect us to a powerful, magical source.

It’s these threads that we try to hold on to and keep hold of as the days go by, like a key to ourselves, to the transcendence of reality, to creation. They point the way to a faith in something beyond ourselves, in an invisible divine that is nonetheless buried within us.

As soon as he wrote the first tracks, Jawhar heard second voices. ‘I recorded the first demos singing the second voices to fix them and because I felt they were part of the songwriting process. I then imagined that these voices would be sung by several guests on the album.

Then he met AZA at a festival in Paris, one sunny day in early summer, around a table sharing songs and precious moments in the company of the Tunisian duo Ÿuma. ‘She told me that she had recently moved to Brussels. So we met up again at the beginning of the school year and started singing the new songs quite naturally. AZA came in and ‘settled’ into the songs with such ease and naturalness that I didn’t think too much about who would sing the second voices. Although her music and the projects she has worked on before are very different from the world of the album, she immediately has the right interpretation and the restraint needed for these new tracks. And meeting her injects freshness into the tracks in progress and speeds up the lyric-writing process.

Like most of the events surrounding the development of Khyoot, the elements come together naturally, the filaments have unfolded and we simply have to welcome them.

When Jawhar works on an album, he tries to see a path, first for himself and then for the listener who is going to walk through it. So the idea behind Khyoot and the magic, invisible filaments is to let yourself be carried along by a brighter period and then follow where it leads.

As he wrote the songs, and then the order he wanted them to appear in the album, a path seemed to emerge. In the end, it’s the emotional journey that emerges from any journey; even if you set off full of enthusiasm, there are moments when you stop and ask yourself questions. We wonder why the magic threads we saw in the air yesterday are less present today, what makes these moments so happy, and what makes them disappear.