The face behind catchy digital psalms

For the last two years, the quirkiest Christian songs this side of Half-handed Cloud have been appearing on Bandcamp (and sometimes YouTube), attributed to an act called Siham I AM.

Make that an extremely coy act called Siham I AM. Its website says that siham means “arrows” in Arabic and that “I AM” is the name of God. But the site does not say who or what is creating the band’s bubbly, lo-fi techno tunes.

And Then … Siham I AM

It turns out it’s both a who and a what. The “who” is a Floridian named Sally Bishai who sometimes calls herself DJ Sallysal and who lists earning a Ph.D. in philosophy among her diverse accomplishments. The “what” is the technology she uses (more about that in a minute) to turn her song ideas into audio artifacts with titles such as “I Will Worship You” and lyrics such as “God, curtail me. / I was kinda fuming mad. / It was a while back, / but now I am on track. / OK, I can’t lie. / It was an hour ago / as my blood-pressure readings show. / Can you help me let it go?”

“I think it’s safe to say that up until, like, three years ago I wasn’t really serious about my faith, or I thought I was a better Christian than I was,” says Bishai. “The fact that I thought I was a good Christian tells you how bad of a Christian I was.”

She punctuates that confession with a laugh. She laughs a lot. She also likes to point out that while she doesn’t consider herself charismatic or Pentecostal, she’s not above receiving the occasional “word of knowledge” or tuning in to the Trinity Broadcasting Network to catch the evangelist John Bevere.

“He had this video, and it was called This Is Why You Feel Stuck in Your Wilderness,” she says. “And I said, ‘Wilderness? What’s that?’ And I kind of felt an unspoken question from the Holy Spirit, which was ‘Did you ever think that I actually had a plan for you, that you don’t have to try to find out what you’re supposed to do and just get a rubber stamp from me?’ And I was like “What? How?’”

The “what” was to write and record contemporary psalms expressing her renewed experience of Christ. This she has done on EPs titled And Then … and The Calling. The “how” was by using 21st-century tech such as the MIDI-controller ROLI keyboard, the music-composition software Odesi, and the effects available at the digital audio workstation FL Studio. The thoroughly digital, synth-poppy results are unlike anything coming out of the above-ground Christian-music scene and super catchy to boot. “Harmony: always,” reads the “about” section of the Siham I AM website. “Whimsy: usually. Drama: indubitably.” An apt description.