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Mo H. Zareei aka mHz is an Iranian electronic musician, sound artist, and researcher, based in Wellington, New Zealand. Using custom-built software and hardware, his experiments with sound cover a wide range from electronic compositions to kinetic sound-sculptures and audiovisual installations. Regardless of the medium, Zareei's work aims to highlight the beauty in the basics of sound and light production and reductionist audiovisual elements that draw inspiration from physical and architectural principles. Over the course of his PhD, he developed a portfolio of works focused on the intersections of sound art and Brutalism. Zareei has presented his work at international venues and festivals such as ISEA (Montreal/Vancouver/Dubai), SETxCTM festival (Tehran), NIME (London), Modern Body Festival (The Hague), ICAD (New York), and NZ Festival (Wellington), to name a few. His installation "Rasping Music" was the recipient of the first prize for Sound Art at the last iteration of the international Sonic Arts Award in 2015 (Italy). Under the moniker mHz, Zareei's electronic music projects have been published via LINE (US), Important Records (US), leerraum (CH), and Kasuga Records (DE).
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Cassette
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SAUNA 070CS
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Mo H. Zareei (mHz) returns to Imprec/Cassauna with Proof Of Identity, an album of pulsating, pattern-based electronic pieces that evolve in ways reminiscent of Steve Reich's early work or Philip Glass's Music In 12 Parts. With Proof Of Identity, Zareei confronts issues surrounding identity and authorship in composition specifically when created by non-Western musicians. He simultaneously tackles orientalism and the normative take on identity politics.
mHz: "More than a decade ago, I made a piece of beat-based electronic music and titled it 'Middle Eastern IDM' for a course assignment. After listening to it in class, my professor asked what was Middle Eastern about it. It was only a year after I had left Iran to study in the US, and I didn't know that I could say 'I am. I made the piece'. So I went back and superimposed a sample of Egyptian protest chants on top of the piece, to make it 'sufficiently Middle Eastern'. What prejudiced conservatism and performative liberalism share is gatekeeping practices that box one in a preconceived state of otherness. While the former overtly regards that otherness as inferior, the latter exoticizes it through patronizing paternalism . . . When you look at who gets to decide if something's indigenous enough, you see how decolonization itself has been colonized. When you listen to this piece, I'm very happy for you to keep in mind that it was made by someone from Iran. But I might need to clarify that this piece has nothing to do with Sufism and the whirling dervishes, the interweaving patterns of the Persian carpet, the poetry of Rumi, or Islamic architecture. And if you hear those moments of 'non-western' sonorities, that is because I have constructed this piece from samples of a piece of Iranian traditional music -- an overplayed piece that was all over TV and radio while I was growing up Iran, one that I never found particularly inspiring or interesting. Here, I have tried to make it more interesting by completely taking it apart and reconstructing it through my personal compositional techniques, aesthetic preferences, and a wide range of musical influences. So in short, while this piece might not sound like your archetypical Iranian music, I assure you that it is Iranian enough."
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CD
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IMPREC 332CD
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Function is an aesthetic exploration of digital audio at an elemental level: a sequence of quantized amplitude values. The entire sonic material in this series are generated through a custom-designed program that takes a mathematical function as input, and based on a set of pre-defined criteria, outputs the function as a digital waveform. Accordingly, each track in this series is named after one mathematical function, where the function itself is used as the only sound-generating engine. These raw sonic materials are then processed through a number of common audio effects, and organized and structured into a compositional form. Function builds on an ongoing investigation into realization of Brutalist aesthetics through sound and audiovisual media. Through a reductionist approach towards its distinctly digital sonic structures, the work embraces the crude limitations of its medium as the primary aesthetic construct. It uses mathematically constructed tonal and rhythmic structures to allow for a celebratory exposure of its "anti-beautiful" raw material. In doing so, it projects an uncompromising clarity of structure, a conscious negation of interpolation, and a steadfast refusal to hide the machine's footprint. Mo H. Zareei, aka mHz, is an Iranian electronic musician, sound artist, and researcher, based in Wellington, New Zealand. mHz is the acronym for millihertz. Using custom-built software and hardware, his experiments with sound cover a wide range from electronic compositions to kinetic sound-sculptures and audiovisual installations. Regardless of the medium, Zareei's work aims to highlight the beauty in the basics of sound and light production and reductionist audiovisual elements that draw inspiration from physical and architectural principles. Over the course of his PhD, he developed a portfolio of works focused on the intersections of sound art and Brutalism. His Brutalist Noise Ensemble has been featured on platforms such as Creative Applications, Streaming Museum, and Fast Co. Zareei has presented his work at international venues and festivals such as SETxCTM Festival (Tehran), New Zealand Festival (Wellington), the International Symposium on Electronic Art (Vancouver), and New Interfaces for Musical Expression (London), to name a few. His installation "Rasping Music" was the recipient of the 1st prize in Sound Art category of the international Sonic Arts Award 2015 (Italy).
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