I’ve been wanting to reset my idea of music. I’ve had this goal a couple of times, where I totally shift my process up and something new happens. Coming from a club music background, I started feeling a bit locked.
Repeating the same formulas, tricks, and whatnot.
My first attempt of this “act of resistance” towards usual habits in my process was to get out of the claustrophobic mindset of making the one banger after the other, which is a very capitalistic mindset position to have as a music maker.
An act of position had to change for me to develop other methods for composing. Getting out of the laptop was a start. Working with acoustic sources such as piano and grand piano strings was my debut experience with the material. A personal obsession with the touch of skin on steel was unleashed.
A new connection with a traditional instrument was built, but the mission was to make a kind of untraditional music. If everything was in grid and quantized (with swing) the process consisted of wiping out the grid and make a kind of asynchronous music. A kind of music where sounds and rhythms unfold in and out of place. That album got released in ’22 and I continued working with music that unfolds organically for the album after as well.
After having explored timing without default grid and confronted the habit of putting anything into it, my process of writing is now starting as a blank screen horizontally.
It came to my conscious that I haven’t confronted the vertical processes yet. Never have I taken any decisions about notes, let alone scales. This might sound absolute mad for some of you reading, but coming from a dance music background, my concern has never been notes. If I may I’d like to quote Varése on his compositional identity I relate to; a worker in rhythms, frequencies and intensities. My attention was towards finding the right character the compositions needed in the library of sounds. The concern has been about making sure to separate sounds in different octaves in satisfaction for the spectral graphics. Meaning filling up the lows, mids and the highs in the spectral graphs for my works.
Since I’ve been DJ’ing in clubs for the last 13 years, the great deal of experience and knowledge about turntablism would make sense to use for this project. What makes the contemporary digital turntables relevant for this project is that their dynamic pitching and tempo shifting options are extremely good quality compared to DAW’s and other samplers, since the turntable has the responsibility of making dancefloors going the tempo of tracks are constantly being switched up or down for the sake of beatmatching.
Through turntablism discovering how the recorded studio sessions can interact with each other. This method helps me present the many possibilities of different counterpoints there can be. The tempo sliders on the CDJ’s (name of the deck player) let me use the tempo as one of the main instruments. Helping me rethink how these sound sources can be used and m
aking new counterpoints available via slowly letting the sounds meet in the two channels or clashing them together and wait for magic to happen at some point. (input video from u110)
guitar amps
The use of amps is directly placing the Persian instruments into a western aesthetic material. The load of the guitar amp and how it’s been branded makes it a bit of a humorous addition and clash of this Persian instrument and this very western object and effect. Technically the guitar amp adds overtones that makes the tanbur’s (3000-year-old instrument) sound higher frequent and adds more body to the instrument (+ a fair bit of compression and evens out the dynamics). Locational the amp adds a new dimension in the source. As the recorded sessions are in recorded in Iran sent to me in the West and being played back through an amp a recorded back into my laptop makes the sound source to have lived physically in the two countries, I’m involved in. While being played very pure in Iran and sent to me the source the western object (the guitar amp) adds its character onto the source.
Not that it’s possible to work entirely in this binary form (disclaimer: I do not wish to only work in these categories), but splitting up the process would result in difference sounding experiments and compositions and the projects will communicate their methodical differences. The results coming out of these two methods end up being the symbols of the politically correct way of working with Persian music and the second method being less politically correct, being dependent on western major corporations (disclaimer: this is no official statement, but a personal journey of the correct/incorrect way of methods coming out of the learning and research I’ve been through in this project.)
software cello instrument & other digital instruments in persian 7-tone daramad tuning.
Here's an example of the tempo getting hijack'ed where I'm using the tempo as an 'instrument' turning the tempo up & down and recording the piece via screen recorder, since DAWs are not able to record the tempo, without trying to polish the sound at the same time.
an example of a euclidean sequencing jam with digital drums playing alongside iranian percussionist Mehdi Azizi and Koroush Almasi playing the setar. This is a detached recording. None of us have played these sounds together in the same room and neither are they edited in the timeline in any way. A demonstration of a pure detached improvisation.
My collaborators have primarily been two Iranian musicians: Mehdi Azizi, a percussionist, and Koroush Almasi, who plays the tanbur and setar. These musicians are based in Kerman, the western part of Iran known as the Kurdish region. Mehdi has spent most of his life touring with well-known Iranian singers and musicians. Koroush, after years of touring, decided to establish his own music school and teach in his hometown.
Given the current political situation and the risk of military service, traveling to Iran is not a option for me. So, our collaboration had to take place through WhatsApp and Telegram.
We discussed our musical backgrounds and the differences in our environments, comparing the music scenes in Denmark and Iran. Mehdi, 48 and used to the active life of a musician, quickly asked about the business aspects of our project. This was something I hadn’t considered. While the musicians received their salaries, I hadn’t planned for the possibility of bringing them to Europe for a tour. As a relatively unknown composer, I had to tell them I lack the resources to cover their travel expenses.
This led me to question how to ethically handle the recordings they would send. Is it acceptable to use their sounds without their physical presence?
Our collaboration involved me sending 40 minutes of electronic sounds and some santour pieces, which they then improvised over in their local studio. To approach this project from a fresh angle, I decided to discard the original electronic pieces. By forgetting what they had played along to, I aim to create a kind of detached music where new possibilities can emerge. This method of not playing together but rather alongside one another fosters a unique form of detached music, where each part exists in its own sonic life within the larger experiment and composition.