P - T

Siavash Amini

[IR]

Photo by Mehran Ahmadi

Siavash Amini is a prominent Iranian instrumentalist and producer living in Tehran. His evocative soundscapes combine granular synthesis and controlled noise with ambient music and modern classical composition.

Deeply influenced by the culture of southern Iran, where he spent most of his teenage life, Amini began playing guitar in 1999 and formed his first band with Hesam Ohadi in 2001. In 2006, he started experimenting with computer music software, composing music for films, theatre and art exhibitions. A collaborative album, Spotty Surfaces, was released in 2010 by Mahriz Recordings, but it was his 2014 solo LP, Til Human Voices Wake Us, that introduced Amini to a wider audience outside Iran. The cerebral, ambient work, unspooling over ten tracks, was structured around poems by T.S Eliot and described by Headphone Commute as "a work of depth, finesse, and beauty with a poignant emotional undercurrent that gives it as gripping an immediacy as you are likely to find in a genre that is considered to be characterized by its unobtrusiveness."

In the years that followed, Amini continued to refine his slow, ambient phrasing, often ascending into all-encompassing drones and accompanied by washes of strings and classical melody. He found a home on Futuresequence, a UK-based experimental music label whose catalogue tends toward textured ambience, patterns and sequences of sounds, and juxtaposition of instrumentation and electronics. In the notes for Subsiding, an album of instrumental ambient drone, the label noted: "Monolithic and micro sound sculptures coexist within a perfect balance, a mix which makes for an all encompassing listen across the audio spectrum, funereal yet uplifting."

His most recent albums are collaborative efforts: Topology of Figments was made together with Greek producer and multi-instrumentalist Zenjungle and released on Flaming Pines, and Familial Rot with Matt Finney on Umer Rex.

CTM x SET Festival

HAU1, Wed 01.02.2017, 19:00

9T Antiope, Siavash Amini, Sote with Tarik Barri, Arash Bolouri and Behrouz Pashaei

Contemporary Sound in Iran

Kunstquartier Studio 1, Thu 02.02.2017, 12:00

Sote, Siavash Amini, Sara Bigdeli Shamloo, Karl Smith