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CD
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RM 4211CD
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To understand tuning systems, to peer into the infinity of microtonal compositional strategies, is to imagine a sense of musicality that extends far out beyond the familiar harmonies of the western ear. Iranian composer Siavash Amini, a self-confessed tuning obsessive, has dedicated much of his musical investigations over the past half decade to unlocking new relationships between harmonic events. Moreover, he has sought new timbral relations too and in doing so has honed a particular sonic-aesthetic that is increasingly haunting and spectral in nature. Amini's music is vertical, it reveals itself in ways which are unexpected and requires a certain auditory availability in its listener. Eidolon goes further than any other composition he has completed. It creates a contoured landscape in sound that is equal parts beautiful and overwhelming.
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 (RM 4144CD, 2021). 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."
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CD
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RM 4144CD
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From 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 vein 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."
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LP
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HG 2006LP
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Siavash Amini returns to Hallow Ground with A Mimesis of Nothingness, his fourth album for the Swiss label. Following up on Harmistice (HG 1902LP, 2019) together with fellow Iranian artists 9T Antiope, the six tracks were conceived in close collaboration with another artist and see the prolific composer intensify his interdisciplinary approach. The six tracks enter a dialogue with the photographs of Nooshin Shafiee, an acclaimed artist whose work capturing their hometown Tehran becomes the starting point for one of Amini's most visceral and haunting records. A Mimesis of Nothingness translates the ephemeral situations and melancholic moods of Shafiee's pictures into suspenseful soundscapes that masterfully navigate between the concrete and the abstract. A Mimesis of Nothingness is a disquieting record precisely because it is a quiet one. Working with field recordings, Amini sculpts dynamic portraits that create an atmosphere of tangible suspense that is never fully released. Even when string-like sounds enter the picture as they do on the third track "Moonless Garden" or when the abstract and glacial noise on "Observance (Shadow)" demand the listener's attention, the six pieces take hold of the subconscious rather than trying to be direct and confrontational. It is sound conceived not as a description, but a circumscription of spatial relations and the eeriness embedded in them. Includes eight-page booklet.
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LP
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RM 497LP
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Iranian composer Siavash Amini creates an ode to night; literal and metaphorical. Using textural electronics and post classical arrangements, he asks you to dwell in the "dark" of sound and forgo the sensory certainty of light. From Siavash: "The Idea of this album, when I first started drafting it, was to continue what struck me as very interesting yet simple idea; night. I became interested in different definitions of what night is, our perception of it and what night means physically to us as well as symbolically. I came across the idea of 'other night' described by Maurice Blanchot, during my research. It started me recognizing night as something we experience as 'the night of sleep'; it is night that we resist in sleep, by way of dreaming. Things became more interesting for me during many nights of not sleeping and intoxication, and an eventual nervous breakdown. This experience, culminating in me spending three days in ICU, gave me pause to think about Blanchot's words. Slipping in and out of consciousness my mind, which had already experienced a blurring of what one might call the 'other night' and the night itself, by being in half sleep most of the time. I felt myself far away from all my surroundings and at the same time being very attentive to some details in the objects around me. It was as if my body and mind where in an in-between state. I can only describe this as being distant or more precisely being in the dark. Objects and people showed themselves out of proportion and mostly dim. A feeling to describe this sensation, the word for which I only came across later, is Serus. There was a sense of repetition and familiarity in some feelings and emotions that I had towards some objects like sensing I knew them but not exactly from where or when. It was as if my body was resisting sleep and my sleepy mind was resisting being awake, only to dream of another type of the world that I could be awake in." Personnel: Nima Aghiani - violin; Pouya Pour-Amin - electric double-bass. Artwork and visuals by Tereza Bartůňková.
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CD
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HG 1703CD
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Continuing his experiments combining elements of drone and modern classical music, Tehran based composer Siavash Amini's fourth solo album Tar explores the fragile tensions between an individual and a collective subconscious. Making its starting point the expression of these feelings in dreams and nightmares of each individual, Tar translates the images, feelings, and textures into sound. After a series of noisier and less melodic albums, Tar catches the active listener with a subtle tension created by oscillating sounds somewhere between discomfort and transcendence. Even if some parts of Tar are quite disturbing, the record never becomes simply dark. "Amini provides a satisfying mix of modern classical composition, ambient noise, granular synthesis and musique concrète with a hint of muscularity below its serene surface." --The Guardian
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LP
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HG 1703LP
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LP version. 180 gram vinyl. Continuing his experiments combining elements of drone and modern classical music, Tehran based composer Siavash Amini's fourth solo album Tar explores the fragile tensions between an individual and a collective subconscious. Making its starting point the expression of these feelings in dreams and nightmares of each individual, Tar translates the images, feelings, and textures into sound. After a series of noisier and less melodic albums, Tar catches the active listener with a subtle tension created by oscillating sounds somewhere between discomfort and transcendence. Even if some parts of Tar are quite disturbing, the record never becomes simply dark. "Amini provides a satisfying mix of modern classical composition, ambient noise, granular synthesis and musique concrète with a hint of muscularity below its serene surface." --The Guardian
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