Emergence (double album) | Flaming Pines | 5 June 2020 | London
Emergence was formed within a feedback system that began as I made contact with composers, producers, coders, and artists in Iran whose works and words formed the basis of my academic research. The research was a way to rediscover the space I had left behind and the bridges that were burnt, through practices and imagination of individuals with whom I had shared memories without having met most of them. In these ways this work exists as a hazy ballad of a refugee and a travelogue. It is an aphasic narration of my journey from a sunny nowhere to a rainy bunker in Belfast. It is my story, one of an Eastern nomad finding refuge in Western academia, only to reimagine musicking in the alleys of my distant home. As such, this collection is both an impulse within the resonance chamber of Iranian experimental electronic music and the resonance of its diverse and colourful impulses. It is also a diary that anachronistically narrates the different stages of this journey. It brings together a host of field recordings, found object recordings, live improvisations, recycled sounds, synthesis, and voices, produced in Tehran and Belfast over the span of 10 years. It is an escapist soundscape that is meant to mark a period, stain it with sounds, and materialise it through composition. It is a dialogue between two times, places/spaces, cultures, modes of doing, thinking, and sociality. Since each of these are multiple, emergence too is a heterogenous assemblage. It is a playful engagement with conceptual and physical objects and memories. It is a musical album carefully curated for Flaming Pines, whose presence within the Iranian scene has been a passionate and nurturing one.
