Iranian composer and sound artist Siavash Amini has teamed up with American author, poet and philosopher Eugene Thacker on a forthcoming album Songs for Sad Poets.
This piece, ‘A Shape Forlorn (For Zhu Shuzhen)’ is our first taste of the collaborative project and it’s a dynamic highly textural world that feels equal parts sound art, scifi sound design and dense ambience. In fact this piece alone contains so many movements it could almost be a stand alone feature film score.
It’s one of eight pieces that is inspired by both the cursed poets (poètes maudits), a term coined by Paul Verlaine in 1884 for a group of French poets, of which he was one, who were social outcasts and largely ignored by critics, as well as the German-language tradition of song cycles.
All of their pieces are wordless, which is peculiar given the nature of the collaboration. The presence of Thacker’s words printed in the record’s booklet influence the sound, yet in turn are also influenced by it. It sounds like a fascinating process. ‘Poetry and music do not so much correspond with each other as they conspire together — as songs without words, words without song.’
We spoke to Amini last year. You can read our interview with him here. And he created an incredible mix for us also last year. You can listen to that here.
This is what they have to say about it:
“What unites them on this project is an interest in the idea of the fragility of the human being set against the vast horizon of climate, planet, and the cosmos that produces a »sadness without cause. The pieces on Songs for Sad Poets translate this nearly inexpressible ambient melancholy into dense and sometimes claustrophobic pieces that are marked by internal tensions and slowly unfolding dynamics.”
Songs For Sad Poets is released via Hallow Ground on the 23rd of September. You can find it here.
