impulse|resonance

As a medium that affords manipulation and juxtaposition of sonic events of any kind, electronic and electroacoustic music offer a context for a creative expression of the excluded; marginal sounds and dissident voices. Through decomposition, reprocessing, and recomposition, a material that is denied expression due to its semantic content or aesthetic features can be re-contextualised and re-presented. Iranian literature, music, architecture, art (including craft) is full of such examples. This way of approaching composition does resonate with the practices of experimental electronic music in Iran as well. Although one may criticise such an approach as politically passive, in its disciplined creativity it nevertheless provokes dialogue. Also, in its aesthetic novelty, it allows easier negotiation with the political system, in times when the political system may be too intolerant of the nation’s direct critical expressions. The central element of this piece is a cell produced of two samples extracted from two songs with Persian lyrics. The first sample involves the word ‘Iran’, which is isolated from a song titled Baroon Miad (Persian: بارون میاد), meaning ‘rain is falling’, produced by Fedai Guerillas in 1970s. The second sample involves the Persian word man (Persian: من), meaning ‘self’ in the context of the song. It is extracted from a rap song titled Kavir (Persian: کویر) meaning ‘desert’ by Ali Sorena , produced in 2017. Both samples are, however, processed in such a way that their semantic contents are concealed.