Odiv, a young composer from Ahvaz, communes in Shelâl with deeply felt darkness. It’s haunted not as a fetish, not as the pastiche musical surplus equivalent of a costume shop, as piles up in so much “dark” music. But it’s a horror that’s movingly personal. Maybe it’s time for tea and conversation with all our demons and ghosts. Out now on Zabte Sote.
Odiv has dug into local folklore alongside the rusted-out hulks like the Khuzestan Steel Company. In moments, the album can be disarmingly vulnerable, wounded. In others, it comes at you like a runaway train, flurries of knife-sharp percussion and hyper-edited slices, only to grind to a halt with an aching stillness, leaving you with that deep feeling in the gut. But there’s a sublime and beautiful side to all of this. For all the dissonance, it’s never, well, ugly. There’s something strangely soothing about dancing with all these demons.
The instrumentation incorporates the “classical” instruments without ever separating them from the electronics. You can think of it as new music composed for ney-anban, ney-taki, and oud, all of which prove as nimble in finding timbral extremes as the electronics do. it’s worth saying that everything sits perfectly in the mix and master, rather than composing an etude for the little red lights on the master bus, which may be why it connects better. Kaveh Sattari is back on mastering, and Sote as always with this label seems to act as a mentor and not only a curator, which is what sometimes we all have to be to one another.
The aforementioned steel plant features in the music video, which we can semi-premiere here.
Dôbbâ
۲۲ لَعنة الصُوت و مَحراب الظِل The Khuzestan Steel Company (KSC) in Ahvaz looms over the album like a rusted edifice. Its machinery, ghosts, and industrial sonic landscape are not background textures; they embody violence. Steel and fire, where water and dust once lived. The natural world here is not only gone, but torn apart, decade by decade. This destruction is not outside the music. It is the music.
The bagpipe melody is inspired by “Zâr” by Saeid Shanbehzadeh.
Music and Video by Odiv Mastered by Kaveh Sattari
I once mentioned on this site before that my mom and her family grew up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in a valley lined with steel mills. So you can pair this with the Flood City release I reviewed and get a western PA/Iran connection (of which I’m sure there are others). Rust Belt USA meets Rust Belt Persia.
Here’s that musical reference on the bagpipe:
The release is out now on Bandcamp. Read the full liner notes, please, but this line stuck out:
As a Gen Z Iranian born into contradiction, I have inherited the silence of my mothers and the noise of a broken system.
لاShelâlلا is my resistance. مممممم
And whether we have a connection to Iran or anywhere else, that sounds like a challenge for some of the older generations to act a little less ghost-like and get our own flesh and resistance on the line.
https://zabtesote.bandcamp.com/album/shel-l-2