Jewish tradition conceives of the Sabbath as a bride — variously, the bride of Israel, or the bride of God; or else the people are themselves the bride. On Friday nights, ceremonial singing welcomes the day of rest. Raza remixes and reimagines these prayers and poetry: like any wedding, this is a mixture of serious and profane, of mystical and celebratory, of cerebral and earthy. The two musicians currently at the core of Darshan — the name is Hebrew for preacher or teacher — could not, at first glance, be more different. Basya Schechter is a cantor, and for many years the mainstay of Pharaoh’s Daughter, a Brooklyn-based world/folk fusion band that made music of often crystalline beauty. Eden Pearlstein, by contrast, who goes by the rap name ePRHYME, is a hip-hop MC.

The songs work in this way: first Schechter will sing one of the verses of the Psalms or the Zohar that make up the Friday night ritual, then ePRHYME will use this as the jumping-off point for a commentary delivered somewhere between slow rap and Sprechgesang. Thus “Run My Love”, for example, starts with a Hebrew verse from the Song of Songs (“make haste, my beloved” in the King James version) and then opens up into a condensed meditation on the Diaspora. “Take flight and soar my love”, raps ePRHYME, “over Chagall’s crooked rooftops/and Shalom’s clumsy milk carts [presumably Sholem Aleichem]” — and here the folk-rock guitar arpeggios darken — “out of the efficient ovens of Auschwitz /over the crescent-crowned cupolas of Córdoba . . . ” — then on past the “genizas of Cairo” to a “hennaed hill of spices”.

There are other lyrical tours de force of this sort — “Hapax Legomenon” nods to everything from Moby-Dick to Charlie Parker to Led Zeppelin, though repeating the title phrase is self-contradictory. But the music is just as glorious: Tamer Pinarbasi’s qanun washes on “Animate My Anatomy” and “These Are The Journeys” gleaming like the cohorts of the Assyrian; the psychedelic bliss of “We Already Are” as Schechter and ePRHYME chant interlocking mantras in lysergic circularity; the Gnawa-styled trance of guembri and percussion that serves as a long coda to “Arrives The Bride”; the Klezmer-ragga hybrid of “Sing A New Song”.