Iranian electronic composer Siavash Amini is one of the new generation of critical voices from Iran. Over the last seven years he has released his music on the likes of Opal Tapes, Flaming Pines, Hallow Ground and Umor Rex. His latest album Serus is due on Room40 in August.
We’ve been fans of his work for a while. He contributed to and wrote the liner notes/ introductory essay to the excellent Absence: A Compilation of experimental Iranian music (Flaming Pines) in 2016, which we covered, but was upset by our article and took the time to write a critique of our piece and point out some errors which we were grateful for. You can read that here.
Serus began with Amini considering the notion of night.
“I came across the idea of ‘other night’ described by Maurice Blanchot, during my research. It started me recognising night as something we experience as ‘the night of sleep’; it is night that we resist in sleep, by way of dreaming.
Things became more interesting for me during many nights of not sleeping and intoxication, and an eventual nervous breakdown. This experience, culminating in me spending three days in ICU, gave me pause to think about Blanchot’s words.
Slipping in and out of consciousness my mind, which had already experienced a blurring of what one might call the ‘other night’ and the night itself, by being in half sleep most of the time. I felt myself far way from all my surroundings and at the same time being very attentive to some details in the objects around me. It was as if my body and mind where in an in-between state. I can only describe this as being distant or more precisely being in the dark. Objects and people showed themselves out of proportion and mostly dim.
A feeling to describe this sensation, the word for which I only came across later, is ‘Serus’.”
You can find and pre order Serus here.
photo credit: Ashkan Noroozkhani
