In stock
CD
Siavash AMINI
“Eidolon”
A note from Siavash Amini
Let me get this out of the way; I'm obsessed with Safi-al-din Urmavi’s theory of tuning, rhythm, and maqam. It started in my last year of high school, at the time there was a lot of back and forth between Iranian music scholars about his 17-tone scale and whether it had any use or relevance to Iranian music of that day.
I've been thinking about those discussions and more general discussions of tuning in the maqam system of the 13th century a lot in the past half-decade.
I didn't know how to approach these tunings, but I started to get a sense of it while making A Trail of Laughters. I decided that the relevance of these tunings couldn't be explored with conventional instruments and composition techniques. I do not want to approach them in a historical sense, either. I want to use these as my raw material and find my approach, borrowing from experimental and electronic music of our time.
The apparition, an image appearing and disappearing, taking shape in an instant and gone in the next, something you’re not sure you’ve seen, needs a particular setting to be experienced. Something seen or felt in an undetermined space like Redon's drawings. I tried to see if these tuning systems (mostly Urmavi’s 17-tone scale) could be a starting point for creating such a space for myself by letting their frequencies and intervals roll over each other, and letting the resulting sound and textures float, crash, spill and bleed.
Maybe my other obsessions, namely darkness, light, and death, can be at least in some sense contemplated in this shadowy undetermined space and just maybe something here and there makes its presence felt.
14,00€
Out of stock
CD
Siavash AMINI
“A Trail of Laughters”
rom Siavash Amini
A series of distressing dreams started this whole thing. A few years ago someone pointed out that my repeating dreams of being lost in what seemed to be a maze of pits, reminded them of stories about wonders of wells and pits in the Book of Marvels.
More than a year ago I started having those dreams again, so I read the book. There were similarities with a few of the stories but nothing more. One of the stories made an impression on me more than the others. After being done with the vain project of finding my dreams in a book from 12th century, I started obsessing about every detail of that certain story. Borrowing from distressing artifacts of my own subconscious and mixing them with all the details described or all the things left out of that particular one story, a musical project was starting to take shape in my mind.
Working outside the systems suggested by 12 tone equal temperament, has been a passion of mine from the start of my musical life. I released one track on my first EP doing that, a failed experiment. After that I kept on studying the subject. Whenever I got the chance, I tested out an idea borrowing from other systems of tuning and their suggested compositional techniques.
Imagining a musical equivalent to those distressing dreams and the scenes from the book was a very good opportunity to test out the oddest juxtapositions of the said systems, a formidable but suitable task. The sound, in my mind had to be murky, hazy, highly textured, crackling, resonant yet dingy and distant. It eventually took the shape of an album. The techniques I learned and used during the making of these pieces will remain in use in my musical activities for a long time. This album with all its shortcomings is about distressing dreams/realities of being lost in the darkness of a pit and the sounds/creatures that lead you to it, based on my own dreams and a few lines from an old book.
12,00€