The opening tracks establish Jaan's aesthetic immediately: this is music that exists in the margins between genres, where lo-fi electronics meet the spectral presence of Brian Eno's ambient experiments and the sunbaked tension of Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western scores. Home-made instruments brush against failing tape loops; clarinet lines wander through field recordings of marketplaces and desert expanses; drum machines stutter with the irregular heartbeat of machinery on its last legs. The production is deliberately rough, textured like old photographs left too long in attics, colours bleeding and edges softening until memory and documentation become indistinguishable.

*Baghali*'s greatest achievement lies in its rejection of linear narrative. Tracks don't so much develop as drift, allowing sounds to enter and exit according to their own internal logic rather than conventional song structure. A mandolin might appear mid-piece, state its case with quiet insistence, then vanish as suddenly as it arrived. Distorted guitar squalls erupt without warning, evoking doom metal's crushing weight before dissipating into the ether. Field recordings don't serve as atmospheric garnish but rather as load-bearing structural elements, anchoring the listener to specific environments—a windswept roadside, the cavernous echo of a derelict building—before abruptly shifting perspective, creating a dizzying sense of simultaneous presence in multiple locations.

The album's emotional landscape proves equally fractured. Jaan channels displacement and loss, the particular melancholy of browsing old family albums where faces trigger emotions you can no longer quite place. Certain passages feel heavy with yearning for irretrievable moments, clouded by the unrest and fever of travel sickness and cultural disorientation. Yet hope persists throughout, manifesting as unexpected bursts of colour—a bright synth line cutting through murk, a playful rhythmic pattern emerging from sonic debris. The music breathes with organic unpredictability, taking wrong turns that somehow become right ones, getting magnificently lost before stumbling back onto its path.

The DIY aesthetic never feels like poverty of means but rather appropriate methodology. The broken synths and beat-up reeds aren't limitations but collaborators, their imperfections contributing essential character. This is music that celebrates malfunction, finding beauty in degradation and poetry in technical failure. The tape hiss and crackle become part of the composition's fabric, evoking the "discreet music" tradition while pushing toward territories altogether stranger.

Comparisons to the *Cat People* soundtrack feel apt—both share that sense of prowling unease, of beauty tinged with danger—but Jaan's vision ultimately stands alone. Where Paul Schrader's film moved through urban nightscapes, *Baghali* traverses wilder, more ambiguous territories: garden ruins overtaken by vegetation, vast deserts where sound travels differently, spaces between cultures where identity becomes fluid.

The vinyl edition of 300 copies feels right for music this deliberately obscure, this resistant to the algorithmic flattening of streaming culture. *Baghali* demands the kind of deep listening that rewards patience, revealing hidden details on repeated visits. It's an album that trusts its audience to navigate its non-linear pathways, to find their own meanings within its fractured narrative. Bold, strange, and deeply affecting, Jaan has crafted a singular work that defies easy consumption while remaining oddly, compellingly accessible—a rare and valuable achievement.