TSAMA

Yogi × Shimshai
on SonicTurtle Music

Some songs arrive when they are written. Others wait for the world to catch up to them.

In the spring of 2025, I began working with Dutch artist Yogi Pratedeo, helping him breathe new life into a collection of songs that had been living in his archive. One of them immediately stopped me in my tracks: “Tsama,” a song he had been developing for years with the extraordinary vocalist and songwriter Shimshai, alongside producer TempleStep.

I was particularly moved by the voice and the lyric. There was something ancient and deeply human in it—a longing that seemed to exist beyond language. The Hebrew words, drawn from Psalm 42, speak of a soul thirsting for the Divine like a deer thirsts for water. But beneath that spiritual longing is something more complicated: doubt, grief, conflict, and the desperate search for meaning in a world that can feel profoundly fractured.

The story of the recording itself is almost as long as the journey within the song. Yogi first heard Shimshai perform “Tsama” live many years ago and fell in love with it. He promised to remix it, Shimshai recorded the vocal, and then life, music, technology and time intervened. Nearly a decade later, the track finally found its way to SonicTurtle Studio, where we were able to bring the production to completion.

That passage of time has given the song an unexpected weight. What began as a deeply personal spiritual composition now lands in a world marked by war, division and suffering—particularly in the Middle East. Its central image of thirst feels almost painfully relevant: a thirst for peace, for connection, for something greater than ourselves.

“Tsama” is not a political anthem. It is something more intimate. It is a prayer.

A reminder that beneath our arguments, identities and divisions, there is a shared human longing—to be heard, to be safe, to belong, to find our way home.

The Psalm asks: Where is your God? Perhaps the question is not only where we look for the Divine, but what we choose to embody in the world.

May the desire for revenge ebb in all of us.
May we turn away from using our most powerful technologies to amplify harm.
May our swords become plowshares.
May our thirst for the Divine awaken compassion rather than division.
And may our longing for a better world become something we actively create together.

For this release, all proceeds will be donated toward peace and humanitarian efforts in Palestine.

After nearly ten years, “Tsama” has finally arrived.

Perhaps it was waiting for this moment.

— Adham Shaikh
SonicTurtle Music

From Psalm 42

As the hart longs for the water brooks,
so my soul longs for You, O God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?