Aria Rostami

Siren

Over the last few years, Rostami has been playing with new ideas using field recordings, improvised piano, and tape processing. Already having made a few records experimenting with these ideas, "Siren" sets itself apart as a concentrated approach to illustrate abstract environments and landscapes through sound. On songs like "Cold Stream" and "The Recent Past" you will hear literal field recordings of nature mixed with composed musical emulations of environments, whether it be a representation of running water or the quiet nostalgia of suburban life. Songs like "Landscape" and "Today and Tomorrow" take field recordings of field recording records played in Rostami's studio space along with multiple recordings of the same piano performance. The piano is recorded with a field recorder, as midi and as a D/I recording and woven together, in and out, blending the soundscapes of field recordings and studio recordings into an undefined grey area.

Allegory

Iranian-American composer and ambient musician Aria Rostami joins Phantom Limb’s flourishing Spirituals imprint for new album Allegory, a collection of longing and gently gritty meditations for tape loops, piano and recontextualized old recordings, responding to sobriety, chaos and environmental disaster.

“I often think of forces of nature when I think of collaboration, improvisation or heavy processing; surrendering to choices that are either not my own, impossible to plan or creating something where the finished material could not have been imagined from square one.” Rostami tells us. “I'm not entirely sure if this is true, I can't find anything that backs this up, but an old co-worker once told me that the original definition of the word 'horror' was 'a beauty of nature so profound that it is overwhelming' - true or not, it makes a lot of sense to me - that sometimes beauty can be terrifying or that nature doesn't need to be serene to be inspiring or humbling."

Merging haunting shadowplay with tingling melancholia, Aria Rostami’s sense for texture is uniquely subtle, rendering nuanced piano and drone into immersive, glacial elegies rarefied with static air. Throughout Allegory, Rostami’s palette colours with stillness and beatific stasis, creating an effusive, dreamy impressionism. Shapes float and flicker about a pastel fog, teasing colour and detail before vanishing into mist. Inspired by American composer John Luther Adams, Rostami reflects the natural world in his sublime, organic repetition of melodic phrases, and heartache in the yearning elegance of Allegory’s organic ambient washes.

Astoria

I moved to Brooklyn from San Francisco in the Summer of 2017. The move was something I had been planning for a long time. There was no way I could have predicted what the cultural and political landscape of the US was going to be when I finally landed in New York City. I saved money for the move and came without a job. I was starting over in many ways - in the first few months here I was trying to get back on my career path while also working a part time job, I met the person that would eventually become my wife, I got sober, I was becoming a new person. I wanted my music to be reborn too, I didn't want to make the same things I was making in San Francisco. The first record I made in New York was called "Numb Years". It captured the stress of the country, the uncertainty of my move, the stories from my parent's finally coming to light about their experiences with racism as new immigrants from Iran - the things they never told my brother and me about until they became relevant again in the Trump era. The album captured the noise of New York City, the incredible, unavoidable noise through synths, high tempos and sounds resampled and manipulated many times over. I had never experienced a city this loud before. There was a cross street with an overhead train station I would go to on my way to work that was so loud that I sometimes would not be able to hear the music or podcast in my headphones.

As the years have gone by, I've made a lot of records while in New York. I've made electronic music, acoustic music, techno, ambient, experimental, folk - I've recorded guitar, flutes, piano, glockenspiel, harmonium, synths, melodica, sampled break beats, utilized new hardware, new software and new techniques to capture different times and thoughts in my life living here. Listening back to these recordings as I was putting albums together, I always had to contend with New York City - songs sometimes get lost in the noise of the subway or streets. Recording is much more difficult too. I've waited for far off sirens and airplanes to pass before pressing "record" plenty of times. I always have to remove the clock from the room so that constant ticking doesn't show up on the recording.

Some years ago a friend of mine who is not a musician bought a field recorder - he was just interested in capturing sounds. I told him in passing I could clean up the recordings for him, maybe even add some ambient soundscapes on top of them. It was a nice idea for both of us but ultimately, it never came to be. But it planted the seed in my mind to eventually get a nice field recorder for myself instead of using my phone or finding recordings online of places I've never been to.

Early in 2021, I finally bought a field recorder and started recording my life - just the simple things I was doing anyway. Walks to work, walks home, the office, the roof, the park by my house, a bus ride, getting tested for COVID, doing chores in the kitchen, hanging out with my wife, going to do the laundry, the ambience of my recording space and so on. New York City was no longer a contender to the music, it became the center of the work, everything else added to the recordings were just embellishments. When I listened back to the recordings on my commute, the intrusions from the outside world worked with the recordings. When I was recording environments, I paid attention to sound like I had never done before. It felt cinematic and I felt present in the world in a way I didn't typically. I'm so used to shutting it out with headphones, I rarely spend time just listening to the city as it is. It was a practice of acceptance rather than dismissal. I found that the less I did to manipulate the recordings the better - the natural world of sound didn't need an arranger. I chose to, for the most part, keep the ambient and instrumental additions to the field recordings at the same level or quieter than the field recordings, I didn't want them to be the star of the show.

I also started to realize that there was a significant perceptual difference between a field recording and what I would probably call a "studio" recording. In a studio setting, I'd typically like to capture a sound in an audio vacuum - as pure as possible. Of course with my set up that isn't entirely possible and blemishes seep in from time to time which is ok, it gives the recording some character, but this is only true to a certain extent. Errors in recording or in performance are glaring in a studio setting. This wasn't true at all for a field recording - capturing the sirens and the airplanes was the point. I started to think more critically about this difference - where was the line between the two? When does one type of recording become the other? If I recorded a band playing in a studio and they messed up, that take would be scrapped - but if I captured that same performance on a field recorder while sitting in the studio and included all of the conversation before and after that take, the footsteps and doors opening and closing between the recording area and mixing booth, then I wouldn't hear the recording as a scrapped take, I would hear it as a document of that time and it could work as an interesting recording. But where was that line? Was it in the intent of the recording or is it more gray than that?

So, instead of taking the clock out of the room when I recorded, I just left it in the room - I used it as a metronome. Field recordings will start in my home studio like on "The Last Day" and you'll hear me walking around the room with a recording of a piano I made playing from my computer speakers, then slowly that field recording gets overtaken by the studio recording, imperceptibly slow, and the ambience of the room is slowly replaced by the park by my house recorded months prior which transitions to recordings in my neighborhood and a new ambient synth is introduced as you slowly return to my home studio by the end of the song. The screeching of construction vehicles harmonize with violin on "Indescwibable Peace and Joy". Music plays from cars and shops on my walk home through Crown Heights as people talk about ketchup and yell to the city about CoronaVirus on "The Nuclear Bomb" until you settle in my home with my wife and I listening to music, washing dishes and then transporting to a tiny shore in Queens, where the waves give way to a jazz band playing on the street and church bells recorded weeks later seep through on top of shoppers pushing their carts along with bowed instruments and bells I recorded years ago. And my favorite, "Astoria" captures the sounds of Astoria, Queens from the rooftop of my workplace in January 2022 - synths come in on a minor key and transition to a major key, sweeping away like the wind on a rooftop, the years that went by to finally come to this place, the decisions, accidents and miracles, struggling and overthinking only to realize things don't always need to be controlled.

Bolbol

Brooklyn-based, Iranian-American artist Aria Rostami takes the helm for the next Shaytoon release with the “Bolbol” EP. Aria is a contemporary artist who has been releasing exquisite electronic albums in the last decade with a stunning ear for sound design, alluring melodies and irresistible emotions in his music. Bolbol features a palette of sonic potions from him along with remixes from legendary Iranian experimental artist Sote, as well as two remixes from label boss Sepehr.

Maramar

Maramar is a departure from Rostami’s recent ventures into ambient music and acoustic instrumentation. The record takes a deep dive into meticulous IDM breakbeat chops interspersed with playful sample cuts and distant, yearning synths. The first four tracks play and bounce around with high tempo and high energy beats, transitioning in the middle of the album to mournful high tempo tracks with beautiful chords and wandering melodies deep under the beats. The album closes with a lush, ambient, neoclassical string-like orchestration made with the assistance of granular synth hardware made by Rostami’s brother.

Time Apart in the West

“Time Apart in the West” is Rostami and Blomquist's second record created while the duo were recording material in separate cities and their 6th release together.

This allowed for a completely different creative process, which focused more on compositions done separately rather than improvisations done live in the same room.

The songs on “Time Apart in the West” are shorter than the duo’s usual 10+ minute songs - some running just under 2 minutes.

The recording process began in the summer of 2020, while sheltering in place due to the Coronavirus with Rostami sending Blomquist organ improvisations he had done. These recordings were processed, sent back and then combined with additional recordings including synthesizers, acoustic instruments, field recordings, and an array of snippets pulled from the hours upon hours of recorded improvisations done between Rostami and Blomquist.

What resulted was an album that stands on its own in the catalogue of this duo’s work, with moments that feel like you’re sinking in the ocean and moments that feel like sitting on a porch at dawn in the summer heat

ACRA

Brooklyn-based artist Aria Rostami will release his new LP, ‘Acra’, via his Intimate Inanimate imprint this January.

The multi-instrumentalist and producer, who has previously released on Geographic North, Glacial Movements, Dark Entries and Spring Theory, has said that his 10th LP, ‘Acra’, is a wholly new direction musically that focuses on piano, flute and guitar compositions while implementing more familiar aspects such as electronics and ambient textures.

‘My fiancé and I were going to get married on June 12th 2020 but our plans, as well as everything else in the world, were turned upside down when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. We planned a small road trip for ourselves within New York State and Massachusetts that weekend instead. The trip included a stop in Acra, New York, where we stayed by the forest, went to the watering hole because the trails were closed down and spent the first night watching ‘Silence of the Lambs’. We had a mock ceremony on a friend’s porch in Boston and spent a lot of time on the road listening to music. We listened to a lot of acoustic music, especially songs with guitar. It had been a few years since I owned a guitar and I started getting an itch to play one again. I bought a classical guitar as well as a handful of different flutes when we got back to Brooklyn. ‘Acra’ is the sounds and feelings of that faux Honeymoon – the title track itself is a response to Jessica Pratt’s album ‘Quiet Signs’ which my fiancé played for me for the first time on this trip. I recorded the songs at home while we were quarantining – you can hear my fiancé quietly in the background on some tracks as she opens and closes cupboards or walks around – artifacts of our lives in quarantine. The hiss on the tracks, the scratches on the guitar and various room noises were left in to keep the intimacy of the place and time in my life.’

Rostami takes time and leaves a lot of space on most songs which are departures from his rich electronic productions. Combining both polished piano and guitar playing with amateur and rough flute performances, the songs grate against themselves, sometimes offering lucid moments and sometimes hinting at a composition lost in a dream. The limited run of 100 cassettes all have individually hand marbled O-Cards as well as hand stamped J-Cards with a photo of the forests of Acra taken by Rostami in gold ink and an alternate cover of a goat moth in white ink.

Several Days From Now You Will Be Invited To Complete An Online Survey

Brooklyn-based artist Aria Rostami is set to release his new LP, ’Several Days From Now You’ll Be Invited To Complete An Online Survey’, via his Intimate Inanimate imprint this August. The musician and producer, who has previously released on Spring Theory and Dark Entries, has said that his 9th LP, ’Several Days From Now You’ll Be Invited To Complete An Online Survey’, showcases a light, airy musicality with beat driven electronica. 'This record is lively and bright, I imagine an absurd and cartoonish take on Spring or Summer, frogs being squeezed to sing, lakes overflowing, birds being rung like bells, mulch bending, fish sliding across sand, angels with pudding skin rolled in velvet, bubbles the size of boulders popping, a camp for children covered in seaweed laugh crying with joy, large groups of small snails singing from deep within caves.’ Dense, detailed and incredibly layered, ’Several Days From Now You’ll Be Invited To Complete An Online Survey’ sees Rostami depart from previous approaches and, using a predominantly hardware set up, delivers a warm, cosseting and often playful LP that creates its own world for the listener to dissolve into. Each track, despite being mostly built around precise and occasionally clinical beats, displays Rostami’s desire to explore composition while squeezing warmth, humanity and poignancy out of his machines.

Floating Tone

The eighth installment in Geographic North’s long-running Sketch for Winter series, which highlights compositions intentionally crafted for the colder season.

Unsung heroes of the ambient underground, Aria Rostami and Daniel Blomquist have quietly created some of the most aurally alluring sounds released in the past five years. And although that time has solidified the duo’s prowess of production and tenacity of texture, it has also shown its share of disruption and disorder. Having met and recorded all of their past works together in San Francisco, Sketch for Winter VIII: Floating Tone marks the first release made by the pair apart, with Rostami’s recent move to Brooklyn. But rather losing touch or stalling collaboration, the duo’s bond only grew stronger.

Rather than perform live improvisations in the same room, Rostami and Blomquist repeatedly passed material back and forth to be altered over time - sometimes involving extensive alterations, and others barely none. The result brings an astoundingly varied mix of melody, texture, and movement that speaks to the pair’s inherent bond.

“The Sloping Tower” seeps into focus in a haze of pristine clatter, celestial chords, and synthetic detritus. Distant disembodied voices appear through rippling waves of melody, leaving only a tapestry of tattered sound. “The Sleeping Floor” meanders with a nocturnal melody that lulls and placates with a deft, delicate touch. A-side closer “The Guessing Hand” cultivates a seething but subtle soirée of nonchalant noir, suggesting some solemn and forgotten subterranean piano bar.

“The Running Glass” wafts in a cloud of blissful warmth, backlit with dimmed glee and neon vibrancy. “The Sinking Tone” turns the focus back to our piano, heaving in a lush and all-consuming storm of shimmering texture and noise. “The Floating Table” closes things out with utter resolve, reflecting on the receding action and dabbling in some amorphous beauty.

It’s a powerful new chapter in Rostami and Blomquist’s journey that solidifies their past and suggests endless opportunities ahead.

sibbe

As a child of immigrants from Iran, San Francisco’s Rostami came to understand that even his own idea of Iran comes from a specific cohort of the Iranian diaspora living in America and that his view of Persian culture is not the full picture. So what is the full picture? How accurate is our understanding of the world in general? Rostami’s response is to take the same route as Americans before him and make an amalgamation of many cultures to create something wholly American.
Historically, American influence proliferates with ease but it has been difficult for media to come from around the world back to America. This has changed with the internet and smart phones. On Sibbe, SIbbe II, and Sibbe III Rostami uses processed field recordings sent to him from Tehran, Kerman and Taipei to insert glimpses of Asia, one of the largest and often over simplified groupings of “The Other.” Rostami also incorporated much of his own instrumentation including Piano, Turkish Tar, Melodica, Glockenspiel, Vocals, Synthesizer, Violin and Computer. The representations of outside cultures are only glimpsed at and often left fighting against masses of information and sound.

On the other side of the globe, Iran is a country that imprisons artists and a culture that, due to strict control of personal freedoms, is uncomfortable being recorded. Some of the recordings sent could have gotten Rostami’s Tehran source in trouble with the law or otherwise. There were even a few instances where people confronted the source about what was being recorded. Although there are many artists making modern art in Iran, distribution and performance within the country is very difficult and/or in many cases illegal. But, through modern technology, instances of events happening across the world can be digitized and transferred. The source material which was sent and recorded through. This is a representation of how technology opens conversation between cultures, spying and voyeurism through technology, and relationships sustained through cellphones and computers. Sibbe is dedicated to all those who have been killed or imprisoned for making art and to those forbidden to document the cultures they live in.

Czarat

The names of the songs on the release hint at this culture clash. Opener “Czarat” is a fusion of the Russian word “Czar” and the ancient Persian god “Zarathustra.” Rostami refers to this as a “cultural mishmash” and ultimately the names are a nonsense words, creating something new from familiar ideas. The song stands as a reference to the melting pot of disparate sounds within: Motorik Krautrock and North African rhythmic pulsations, Arab synth solos, Chicago acid lines, and Japanese riffing results in an overarching East meets West sensibility, gelling together to create something novel from a chaotic, contemporary trans-cultural communication. And while seemingly heady in its references, hidden beneath its surface is a banging house music core that positions the track well for those moments when the spotlights cut out and the strobes kick in.

Or, for less intense moments, LA’s Secret Circuit takes Rostami’s original and re-interprets it as sunny Balearica, with warm acoustic guitars and delay washes that make for a round, mellow feeling that keeps the energy laidback, sleek, and sexy — like a tripped-out renegade party on some forgotten beach along California’s Pacific Coast Highway.

Finally, “Vietnamoses” rounds things out. A completely different direction, it reveals aspects of Rostami’s more experimental side, with a downtempo feeling inspired by (but, we stress, not evocative of) dub-techno juxtaposed with less overt influences from music around the world with it’s twangs and drones. Space is the key here — his whipping drum patterns lull a hypnotic trance beneath massive walls of metallic echo and delay and a heightened focus on transition (one of Rostami’s favorite themes) allows the song to grow in unexpected ways.

Decades/peter

Decades/Peter collects two related sets of recordings, two dynamic concepts that play off of one another, though Rostami's work is normally highly narrative based thanks to his cinematic and literary influences. Peter is an aural distallation of his relationship with a former collaborator, written in his memory, and meant to encompass both his and the composer's identity, as well as their intersection. Peter represents a more open ended collection of songs, particularly tinted by Rostami's childhood love of video games. Decades was made as its deliberate antithesis. According to him, whereas Peter 'croons with vocals and strings,' Decades 'grinds and falls apart in lush ambiance and static,' though the thread of Rostami's identity runs throughout. Together, they serve as a compelling introduction to the producer's burgeoning body of work and conceptual repertoire.