That is why returning home is such a double-edged dilemma. When you are abroad, you crave the security of "sameness" to support you as you experiment with the uncertain, template-free newness of being abroad - alone and unaccounted for.

However, when you do go back to Pakistan, the shock of the too much sustained on too little, of awkward, fragile angles - be they of buildings, people's neeyats or the ludday-huay lorry's on the roads — are all too much for your ‘self’ to fathom, and you find yourself gasping for want of control, a semblance of understanding and most of all - for an escape.

The frenzy of a country like ours can be mapped onto miniscule points on a line, looping unto each other in a knotted mess of black, knarled graphite strokes marring a tiny piece of white paper, shiny grey at best, leaving smudges all over your already clogged mind.

But having said that, The Harvest makes one realize that Pakistan as a whole, has changed, and continues to do so.

For one thing, new Pakistani music is the brilliant blue of a positive litmus test which proves that the attitude toward our music and those who partake in such delights - has shifted. But this is not a change that has happened overnight.

It's stirrings began to be felt in people like Rushk and Abbas Ali Khan, these were then articulated more definitively by Sajid & Zeeshan their first time around, considered in places like Ali Azmat's Social Circus, refreshed by the delectable dabs of Zeb & Haniya, stunningly evoked in the works of Mekaal Hasan and the furious, back-arching Overload, reaching an apotheosis of sorts in Coke Studio, and existing amongst the provocative (and highly underrated) fringes in the works of the internet dwelling Asfand, Poor Rich Boy, //orangenoise, Mole, Positive, Usman Riaz, Natasha Ejaz, Talal Qureshi and Zoe Viccaji.

This music, this new Pakistani music, stems from our own evolution.

We have grown from a need to internalize all that is external - an ambition tripping forward over it's own eager feet. Instead, we now crave self-contained exploration, one which yearns to slow down and relish it's pleasures and pains in a retrospection of yore. An introspection where simple pleasures take root and are held onto as the bigger picture crumbles or zooms out into a pixelated mess that we are soon unable to discern.

Even when comparing Sajid and Zeeshan's previous album - One Light Year at Snail Speed -  with the new one, you feel a change, or rather, you are aware of the changes within your self.

That's why this new album is best heard when one is on their own. I'm not saying listen to it in solitary confinement — well not the physical variety, anyway.

I am talking about listening to it in the lonely places where we live in our own minds, amongst a bheer of beeples in a waiting area, during our daily commute, whilst roaming aimlessly in the transits of our life. I am talking about the time one finds themselves caught in a transition, the way one waits for The (aptly named) Harvest.

Music of this kind, which builds itself in the times we discount from 'the measure of productivity' of the day, the times when we just take a deep breath to brace ourselves with all we've gone through thus far, and let it out in the thandi saans spaces of now. 'The Harvest' lets us exist in a place where as Plato - the failed wrestler - wistfully noted, "everything is becoming, nothing is."

There is a tired refrain in the criticism being faced by new Pakistani music that other luminaries around the world have done such sort of songs and albums before. But while Kraftwerk, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, and countless others may have used such digitization to portray the musical agenda of their times, Sajid and Zeeshan, like other new Pakistani music manage to colour in ‘our own' musical narrative. They have, within their own time, betrayed a crystallized clarity, a need for white noise, a need for escape which is not seeking denial but actualization.

Of course, the album is not without its flaws. There are moments where the lyrics feel dated, or the music does not feel it has settled in its new form, or hasn't shed enough of it's previous incarnation in the first album.

But those flaws are apparent in light of the album's most rewarding facet - the audacious yet carefully constructed, and somehow comfortably positioned transitions. The end of each song goes hand in hand with the next one’s continuity so beautifully in this album, that the stitching together of songs effortlessly sweeps you off your feet without forcing you to feel any-which-way, except to explore your own musings. And listening to Sajid’s clear voice - tone and tenor - you chew your intellectual cud like a cow does: in slo-mo ruminations.

Sajid & Zeeshan are themselves artists whose work marks the ‘change’ in Pakistani music that we keep searching for, but not seeing. Theirs is a farq which we older types can relate to and yet accept as an evolution to internalise. And perhaps their in-between nature is what allows them the insight into the importance of continuity, of a patchwork seamlessly sewn into our consciousness afore, yet one harkening a newly, quilted whole.

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.