The news can be numbing in all its violence and mindlessness, compounded by a chorus of shills across media and social media. Temp-Illusion, the duo formed in Tehran by Shahin Entezami and Behrang Najafi, cuts through those feelings like a knife. Then stick around for the deeply meditative Bayal بیل (Shahin + Adel Poursamadi).
First, this month we got a single and video from Temp-Illusion. “Sketchy” is alarming, but cathartic. It has the duo’s usual sound design edge, but beats defiantly against the walls and floor. And the visuals speak for themselves. This is an anthem for resisting nonsense and cruelty.
And the timing is apt. This weekend alone saw deadly airstrikes across Palestine, Lebanon, Ukraine (in a new record for ballistic missiles, as always launched into residences), and by the USA on Iran (also with fatalities), plus ensuing chaos elsewhere across the region. In each case, civilians pay the price, from children to adults to the elderly.
It’s been especially hard to watch the situation in Iran, especially having heard first-hand from people I’ve known a long time about witnessing violence by both the regime and by US and Israeli airstrikes. Without drawing equivalencies, every involved party seems to deny people their humanity. I know many in the Iranian music scene I’ve covered have expressed frustration at feeling abandoned, whether by their own people or by the rest of us.
I’m putting this into words, but there’s just not a lot more to say. So I guess I’m here to encourage musical expression, because it carries that emotional reality, the weight of all the contradictions. We live in a world where old men continue to trade away people and the planet. When you run out of voice to scream, then you have musical instruments and electronics and the rest to add to that voice.
Behrang did the music video together with mazdaalinia. The single is out now on France’s Paradox Club.
In case you missed it, their “Longing For Rain” track says everything, too.
In another duo, Shahin (Tegh) joins Adel Poursamadi for a haunting setting of 1964 short stories by Iranian author Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi. In eerie, intricate homophony, we hear aching cries as string instruments (both Western and Persian) melt into electronic timbres. Gestures dance on the muddy, groaning soil of netherworlds like fleeting birds.
That pit you feel in your stomach as you mourn, and suddenly become more aware of the atmosphere around you, of your breath …these tracks feel like that.
From the notes:
The book – The Mourners of Bayal – is a collection of eight short stories set in the fictional village of Bīll, exploring heady themes of loneliness, despair, sufferance, famine, superstition, and death in an unnamed time period without clues to its geographic setting. Suspended in a gloam of moaning and unplaceable synthetic textures, the earthen and worldly timbres found in Bayal conjure this verisimilitude with grace. The imagined village of Sa’edi’s creation appears as a desolate, foreboding potency, cloaking the sonic space in darkness.
“In this album, the focus is less on the details of the stories, characters, or events, and more on their overall atmosphere,” writes Shahin Entezami. “During the creative process, the book and its stories were approached from a distance, as if the village of the book was being seen from the top of a hill. From this perspective, complex relationships, conversations, or the precise intensity of situations cannot be understood, only the movements, objects, and faint memories of the characters are felt. It is as if the voices of the people, their cries, and other sounds are heard from afar, but the details remain unclear.”
Tegh and Adel are a favorite Tehran duo. They talk about piecing this together from improvisational conversations. Walking that line between spontaneity and narrative, straight improv and compositional production, I think, is at the heart of this whole circle — and it’s an answer to how to find intention in moments like this. (See also Temp-Illusion’s all-live Noxious Jaaam.)
If you need something after that heaviness, maybe turn back in time to 2022, as well:
Waiting, as always, for freer days.