Home is a Foreign Place:
Exclusive Playlist
After working through more than 50 possible songs, this collection of eight loosely mirrors Zarina’s Home is a Foreign Place series while nodding to Justin’s own cross-continental path.
In that body of work, “home” is constructed through fragments of memory, movement, and space. I kept that in mind while building this mix, so the playlist moves like a sequence of rooms and thresholds.
– Jamila Isoke
1 – Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Dream”
Only fitting we open with a Tokyo native. This piece comes from the score the late Ryuichi Sakamoto developed for a life-sim game released in Japan in 2000. It feels exactly like its title, setting quiet and reflective tones for the playlist’s first “room”.
2 – Duval Timothy and CJ Mirra’s “Journey Begins”
From the soundtrack of My Father’s Shadow, a 2026 film that follows a family’s journey home in the midst of political unrest. Zarina’s own experience with political upheaval and the loss of her childhood home after the Partition of India came to mind here. And the title says it all. Because to know “a foreign place,” there must be a departure.
3 – Arve Henriksen and Jan Bang’s “Migration”
This one comes from an album named Cartography, which already hints at movement. The track marches forward slowly as the trumpet grows more urgent. The moment when its cries strain captures the grief that often comes with displacement.
4 – Nala Sinephro’s “Space 1”
If the previous track captures motion, this one feels like suspension. Nala Sinephro’s music tends to live in this kind of liminal, floating state. It’s displacement again but less panicked, more still.
5 – Arooj Aftab’s “Aey Nehin”
Whatever playlist I finalized, this track had to be in it. In Home is a Foreign Place, each of Zarina’s prints features a single word in Urdu, her mother tongue. So hearing Arooj Aftab croon in the same tongue felt like a natural bridge. Here she captures another side of movement: the anxious anticipation of waiting for someone’s arrival.
6 – Nick Hakim’s “Vertigo”
Ok, technically this one’s about love. BUT the feeling still translates well. Settling into a new place comes with its own vertigo, the sense that things are moving “fast as hell” and the overwhelm that accompanies it.
7 – Nujabes’s “Counting Stars”
Another late, great Tokyo music maestro. The image of lying back and looking up at a star-filled sky carries a kind of quiet nostalgia that feels reflective rather than sad. The kind of moment when you pause long enough to notice and appreciate small things.
8 – Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky”
The instinct to suppress feelings you aren’t sure how to acknowledge might sound familiar to anyone who’s grown up between cultures. The weight of adapting and code-switching, and the sense of not being fully this or fully that. But the strength of this track is in its self-awareness, like in the moment you’re finally ready to name what you’ve been carrying.
9 – Sulk Station’s “Take Me Home”
Closing things out is this track by Bangalore-based duo Sulk Station–husband and wife, at that. The song moves through a familiar wish: for home or belonging to be handed to us. But then comes the quiet realization that we have to construct or choose it ourselves.
