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LP
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SMR 081LP
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How can a sense of beauty be found amidst fear and cruelty? How can all the unspeakable be made audible, but also anger, hope, and an unyielding will to live? With his third album Temple Of Hope, Iranian composer Saba Alizadeh has created a moving homage to the people of his homeland. He transforms the events during the "Woman Life Freedom" movement, as well as the struggles of the population in previous years, into poignant electro-acoustic music. Intensified by the vocals and lyrics of Andreas Spechtl, Sanam Maroufkhani, and Leila Rahimi. In his compositions, Saba Alizadeh combines the traditional string instrument Kamancheh with strings, modular synthesizers, and a no-input mixer. This results in a tense sound that explores the speechlessness and torn emotions between suffering, rebellion, and hope. Historical radio sequences ground his pieces in the culture and history of the country. The strong alienation and deconstruction of these acoustic elements, in turn, point to the incomprehensible -- to existential upheavals and dissolution processes.
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30M 003LP
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With I May Never See You Again, the Iranian composer, musician and virtuoso of the Kamanche violin Saba Alizadeh will release his first album on the newly founded Hamburg label 30M. As on his debut album Scattered Memories from 2019, the 37-year-old Saba Alizadeh mixes his instrumental virtuosity with spherical electronics, samples of Persian musical instruments and field recordings from his hometown Tehran. Born in Tehran in 1983 to world-renowned tar and setar virtuoso Hossein Alizadeh, Saba studied the Iranian Kamanche violin with Saeed Farajpoury and Keyhan Kalhor, as well as photography and later experimental sound art with Mark Trayle at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles. Influenced by the conceptual approaches taught there, Saba Alizadeh's music is based on Iranian traditions and scales, only to deconstruct and abstract them in the next step. As a result, the nine mostly instrumental tracks on If I Ever See You Again inspire as sonically differentiated meditations on the subject of memory. For example, in the track "Silences Inbetween", Saba proceeds highly conceptually, when he amplifies the breathing pauses of silence in speeches of dictators from past times in historical acoustic reverberation rooms to such an extent that this silence becomes audible as distortion. The silence of the masses, "Silences Inbetween" reports, is thus by no means merely neutral sound or noise, but consists of highly charged vibrations that, amplified beyond recognition, tell of a utopia (that did not occur), a different course of world history. In this sense, it is probably a twist of fate that Saba Alizadeh befriended Andreas Spechtl, the singer of the band Ja, Panik, in Berlin in 2016, shortly before Spechtl moved to Tehran for some months as part of an artist residency. Andreas Spechtl became famous in the German-speaking world primarily thanks to his song lyrics, in which he deconstructs words in a similarly abstract way as Saba Alizadeh does the music. On If I Ever See You Again, Spechtl and Alizadeh collaborate on the two tracks "Phasing Shadows" and "Touch". Saba Alizadeh also collaborated with electroacoustic sound artist Rojin Sharafi, a native of Iran who now lives in Vienna. With her, Saba composed the track "Hybrid". Not least because of the ongoing pandemic, the two collaborated virtually, exchanging sound tracks over the Internet -- hence the title "Hybrid".
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KR 060LP
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2021 repress forthcoming in October. On his debut album Scattered Memories, the composer, musician, and true master on the Iranian spike fiddle kamancheh Saba Alizadeh blends his instrumental virtuosity with spherical electronics, samples of Persian music instruments and field recordings from his hometown Tehran. Born in Tehran in 1983 as son of the world-renowned tar and setar virtuoso Hossein Alizadeh, Saba Alizadeh studied the Iranian spike fiddle with Saeed Farajpoury and Keyhan Kalhor, plus photography and later experimental sound art with Mark Trayle at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles. His musical activities that lead him all around the globe for performances (amongst others, at Carnegie Hall) branch into two different areas: on the one side Alizadeh is a highly-reputed virtuoso on his traditional instrument, on the other he likes to approach music from a more experimental/technological aspect in his electronic/electro-acoustic pieces. This not being enough, he founded Noise Works in 2014, a platform and label for organizing experimental concerts and for the transfer of knowledge of music technologies among young Iranian musicians which makes him a central figure at the forefront of the current, very vivid Persian music scene that gained a lot of attention through artists like Siavash Amini, Porya Hatami, and of course Sote who included a track by Alizadeh on the compilation Girih: Iranian Sound Artists (2018) that he had curated. In 2018, Alizadeh self-released his debut Scattered Memories on CD in Iran which now, in a reworked version, sees its deserved worldwide release on vinyl. Over the course of ten tracks, Alizadeh melts his two musical worlds into one: tradition meets modernism, eastern sounds meet western production, folklore meets contemporary electronics. An album that will appeal to an open-minded "world music" audience as well as fans of current streams like ambient or drone in its most subtle forms. 180 gram vinyl; Includes download code.
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