Posted on by Damian Van Denburgh

Eidolon – Siavash Amini – The Thing Itself

The origin of the term “thin place” can be traced to Celtic/Christian culture, and a rough definition might be a location that exists as a conduit or gateway between the immediate world and a metaphysical, ethereal realm right next to it. However, the location of any given thin place is a bit harder to pin down, since a thin place tends to “exist” both subjectively and globally, beyond boundaries and nationalities. But it’s as much an uncanny feeling about a place as it is the place itself, a sensation of other lives having passed through a place but possibly still existing in it as trace element and shadow. A nexus of the real and the imagined, a simultaneity of the is, the was, and the may be.

In a way, Iranian musician and composer Siavash Amini’s latest album, Eidolon, released on Lawrence English’s brilliant and unstoppable label Room40, is a musical thin place – a space in which Amini explores the 13th century tuning systems of Safi-al-din Urmavi, while hoping to capture a glimpse of any nascent wraiths or eidolons that might be found there. As a result, Eidolon is brimming with seething, visionary music and suggestions of all sorts of presences, both real and imaginary.

The opening track, “Ortus,” erupts like a malevolent creature disturbed from its sleep, spraying out a shifting miasma of enmeshed textures that sound like slithering tentacles, sibilant whispers, and wordless curses. The imprecations fade quickly, revealing cavernous, silty spaces girded by chest-thrumming bass. An uneasy drift across this liminal zone lands the listener in a soft and unexpected silence. Densely braided chords slowly emerge from that, chords that radiate and modulate, shine and shudder, and sound as if they’re issuing from enormous, rusting pipe organs. The chords eventually settle into throbbing drones for the remainder of the track’s duration, but the burning tension prevents any sort of hallucinatory transport one might associate with drone music. Instead, “Ortus” resolves itself in a truce between conflicting impulses, though it’s an uneasy truce at best.

“Instantia” begins with the throat-clearing, staticky sound of an electric organ wheezing into life, a gentle incursion of the tactile/real, and the suggestion of some sort of presence, at least human. A dark, glowering drone gets worked up, sounding like a chorus of demon-haunted bagpipes, before cutting out in a heart-stopping caesura. Into the airless absence, a high-pitched, drone-like cry presents itself, thick with the reedy sound of string instruments, but also sounding like a warning siren, putting the listener on notice. Amini surrounds the drone with a cycling, metallic moan, creating a sound both mournful and alien, and makes room for the two elements to twist and twine and infiltrate each other while maintaining their morphing identities.

The title of the final track, “Relictio,” refers to the recession of water from soil, a natural occurrence that leaves soil permanently exposed. The track opens with a dread-filled stasis, a foreboding, gestating combination of the strings and organs that have come before. A crackling sound, almost like thunder, splits the atmosphere and a cascade of hiss and static and feedback pours in, including a howling, panting pulse that sounds like a furious creature caught up in the outflow. Then: sudden silence, a stand-off of sorts, punctuated by short yelps and feints. Amini floods the new space with a welter of noise – riverbed drones, wall-to-wall rumbling, and, jostling on the surface of it all, a teetering, tuneless melody groaned out by what sounds like unhinged, swinging sheets of metal. (It’s hard to listen to this and not think of some of the recent terrifying and heart-rending footage of towns and cities all over the world that have been flooded; to see people instantly stripped of everything, to see motorhomes and cars and entire houses, objects heavy with meaning, reduced to rootless, lightweight trash and sent sailing.) The melee is gradually dialed down as a glowering, pulsing presence fills in and expands, clearing everything away except itself. But, mysteriously, the menacing presence becomes a retreating absence. In its retreat, the reliction begins, and a battered but ascendant series of notes ends the track, providing a fading if exhausted sense of relief.

Sometimes when you can’t find what you’re looking for, you wind up creating it yourself. What Amini has created on Eidolon – powerful, startling, deliriously overwhelming, and unexpectedly tender – might ostensibly work to open a space in which a spirit may appear, but it ultimately and convincingly proves to be the very spirit it seeks.

Posted on by Damian Van Denburgh

Songs for Doomed Humans – Siavash Amini’s Songs for Sad Poets

The title of Iranian musician Siavash Amini’s latest album, Songs for Sad Poets, put me off listening to it for a few months.

There’s a powerful cultural tendency to romanticize the figure of the artist in general and the poet in particular. To fetishize and valorize the suffering of poets who struggle with drug addiction and mental illness. To make saints and martyrs of them, especially the ones who commit suicide, their deaths an indictment of the rest of the human race. Say what you will about their actual poetry, death has bought for them what their work might not have: immortality. An “honor” sanctioned too often by kneejerk sentimentality.

So with this in mind, every time I came across a reference to Songs for Sad Poets, I’d roll my eyes and keep moving.

Shame on me…

There seems to be something much larger at stake on Songs for Sad Poets than the tragic plight of a select group. The scope of Amini’s lament convincingly takes in the population of the planet. This is music for doomed humans everywhere, and it is unrelentingly bleak and gloriously powerful.

Songs for Sad Poets heaves with dread-filled atmospheres that seethe and undulate, that brood and glower and erupt with merciless intensity before fading back into swarming restlessness. And while the album radiates a coherent unity, each track stands out, singular in its integrity and presence. Aside from Amini’s capacious talents and vision, the strength of these distinctions are owed in part to his dedication of each track to the life and work of a particular poet. There’s no binding correlation between the music and the poet’s work – one needn’t listen, for example, to the simmering, caustic waves, insinuating and spreading across a blighted landscape before they rise up in towering solar flare blasts in the opening track, “Obsidian Sorrows,” and be expected to instantly intuit the life and work of Gérard de Nerval, to whom it’s dedicated. With that said, Eugene Thacker has contributed a series of poems that accompany each track and exist as textual counterparts to the music. A reflection and a remix simultaneously, the poems and the music coexist as much as they thrive independently.

Like slow-rolling fog, many of these tracks quietly emerge and mutate, gathering up clouds of sound that swell and recede, blending textures and timbres as they develop while avoiding any sort of narrative progression. There’s no magnetized crescendo pulling things forward, no cataclysmic explosion or grand moment ascended to. Amini carefully, skillfully conjures his elements and then gives them ample space to transform and surprise and fade away. Even the temporal boundaries of “beginning” and “end” feel irrelevant with tracks like “Demented Skies and “Smoldering Stars” reaching a kind of premature end-like silence in mid-track before they resume and head off in new directions.

Amini also scatters elements of field recordings across his tracks. The ringing silences of “A Quiet Glow” are dusted with the chatter of crickets while “A Shape Forlorn” opens with what sounds like the cycling song of tree frogs. Details like this keep the album rooted in the “real” world – and the wretched, sorrowful state of our world is, I think, a large part of what Amini is getting at.

Running beneath this album, like a searching, smoldering subterranean river of lava, is a feeling of unrestrained anger. Not a screaming kind of anger but an indelible, resolute, silent kind that gets expressed in Amini’s relentless intensity and focus. The more I listened to Songs for Sad Poets, the more I began to think that the sad poets of its title are not only the actual poets the music is inspired by, but the people who dream and, in dreaming, turn away from the harsh realities of our future as a species. The cover art depicts a landscape bereft of any evidence of human life. Is it a photo? A speculative illustration? Is it day? Is it night? Do days now resemble nights? Was this place once inhabited and has since become uninhabitable like much of our world will become? Is it the past, the present, or the future we’re looking at? We are destroying our compromised world at this point simply by living on it. How does anyone live with this knowledge and not lose all hope?

Songs for Sad Poets is a compelling, unabashedly sincere cri de cœur that is both despairing and unforgiving at the same time. A statement while statements can still be made. Listen to it and think.