from freak fighter to lamp lighter

OccultHawk · 06-12-2018, 06:42 AM

Phonē to Logos by Porya Hatami

https://porya.bandcamp.com/album/phon-to-logos

This is an interesting 4th World dynamic. An excellent collection of ambient compositions and field recordings. Porya Hatami, who has never performed live, is based in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj in Iran.

He sometimes collaborates with a German artist he has never met in real life. His Twitter feed suggests he’s probably, at least economically, left wing. Here’s an elaboration on his views concerning instrumental music and politics from an interview he posted on his own website:

Quote:

Cyclic Defrost: Wordless music is often too subtle or oblique to be perceived as an ideological threat. Do you agree?
Porya Hatami: It might be harder to spot, but I don’t think wordless music is subtle or that it can’t be political. We know that some of the most politically charged works of the 20th century music are wordless. There are great examples in the work of Schoenberg, Xenakis, Messiaen, Stockhausen, Nono and many more. Stockhausen once said that “I can’t use 4/4 time signature anymore because it reminds me of marching Nazi’s”, so the music form itself can become political or a resistance to an ideology. Also, we have many examples of wordless music that were perceived as an ideological threat. Instances of this can be seen in the challenges that came across Shostakovich’s work or other musicians who were banned by Soviets and the Nazi regime.

The bolded composers are all included in the Freak Fighter Top 40.