Saba Alizadeh – Scattered Memories

Karlrecords

Well, this one wrong-footed me, to be sure. The début album of Iranian composer and musician Saba Alizadeh, I had anticipated something of a showcase for Monsieur Alizadeh’s virtuoso stylings on his chosen instrument, the kamancheh, which he has been playing since the age of ten. Related to the redoubtable rebab, the compelling kamancheh is a form of long-necked four-string fiddle, played with a variable tension bow. And interestingly, with reference to the maestro mentioned below, it is a very distant cousin of the European violin.

Instead – and in keeping with the more experimental side of his musical nature – Scattered Memories is a rich and varied tapestry of sounds, drifting gently from the kind of hyperreal ambient that was once The Future Sound of London’s happy hunting ground to an implied threat, glimpsed from the corner of the eye yet never entirely crystallised, reminiscent at times of Coil.

Perhaps I should be less referential, focussed more on what makes this uniquely itself and less how it might be contextualised against other, most Western, artists. Yet it seems somehow important to do so, and thus liberate Scattered Memories from within the rather restrictive confines of “world music”. For this is an altogether more creolised beast.

Drawing in approaches from his work in photography and visual art, and mixing it with an already-potent combination of instrumental skill and experimental aesthetic, Alizadeh comments on his approach that “You capture sounds and work with them. You treat that sound as an object, you mess it up, you reuse it, do whatever you want with that object. That’s my approach to working, composing, recording music: find sounds and mess with them and create a new spectrum of colours to work with, as either harmonies or melodies”. Commentary, though – mine or even the artist’s – eventually becomes just another friction-producing drag, and we need really to cast away the tether ropes and let the thing take to the wing.

There are a lot — a lot — of textures, moods and layers here, moving over and under each other in a wonderful laminar flow. “Blood City”, the opening track, has something ineffably ancient about it, a vastness and openness, which for some reason instantly made me project mental images of The English Patient and Count László de Almásy’s last desperate departure from the Cave of Swimmers, his futile, doomed attempt to save his beloved Katharine, all hope banjaxed by confusion and fate. “Ladan Dead End” is more recognisably beat-driven, its popping and roaring fusing into a West meets East approach that pleasingly updates Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar’s 1967 iteration perfectly.

The album’s seven-minute centrepiece, “Scattered Drops”, is perhaps the highlight, though, and highly demonstrative of Alizadeh’s interest in silence within his music. “The Radif system,” he explains, “is different phrases put together. The amount of silence you have in between each phrase matters. It sounds different if you play with the proper amount of silence, or if you play with less silence”. Here Alizadeh is in the most rarefied of companies; Miles Davis himself once memorably said “Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there”, and great composers through the ages from Mozart to Debussy have understood, or come to understand, the Gautama-like revelation that it’s the silence between the notes that holds the key to all music. We bow out to the gentle, melancholy of “Fluid”, each note sounded and phrased with absolute precision and attention to detail.

This is a quietly recessive little dark pool of an album (I know a good phrase when I steal one), so dive in and let the water flow over you.

-David Solomons-