Cassette
The evolution of electronic music’s relationship to academia has always been a complex, bordering on uneasy, one. Many—even most—of the earliest iterations of electronic music depended on the kind of studios that only universities, conservatoires, and research institutes could provide; and the work of Stockhausen, Xenakis, the artists of IRCAM, and co. had at least one foot in rigorous intellectual processes. However, there has often been a danger that an academic approach sterilizes the strangeness and bodily thrill of sound-making, or that it looks down on—or even erases—the innovations that took place outside the walls of those hallowed institutions.
Thankfully there are artists like Babak Ahteshamipour who break down those walls. The Iran-born, Greece-raised Ahteshamipour works across many disciplines, his work peppered with phrases like “Politics of Esoteric Imaginaries,” and “Machinist Auxiliaries,” and he’s presented it in galleries like Paris’s Pompidou Centre as well as in universities all over the world. His training is not in the arts or cultural theory, but in materials science; he approaches these worlds as an outsider, and even though he touches on themes popular throughout galleries and academies lately—AR, VR, ecologies, simulacra, migration—there’s a playfulness and willingness to be puzzling, baffling, and messy that brings his work to writhing, seething life. Far from being sterilized or tamed, his art and music are wild.
Thus this album. You don’t need any of the background texts to appreciate Violent Violins Exposed—the sounds just grab you. Even when it’s sedate, as on the opening burbles of “Where Faires Rebel against Lidless Cyborgs,” it has a feeling of natural processes, of delight in the tactile. Once it starts getting more aggro, from the distortions of the third track, “Practicing Cruelty at the Pinnacles of Inverted Pyramids” onward, it hits you in the guts before the brain. The cascade of sound thereafter is more “filthy anarchist basement rave” than “clean-lined gallery,” drawing from gabber, breakcore, deconstructed club, and other vernacular styles. There’s huge harmonic and rhythmic complexity, but it never feels like it’s done to be clever, but rather for that instant impact; the closest recent musical cousin to the high-end shrieks and distorted kicks of this album might be the solvent-crazed funk of DJ K’s “bruxaria” sound from Rio. But after that impact, there really are layers and layers to unpack as you start to decode the track titles, the deranged video game graphics, and enter into Ahteshamipour’s intellectual world. This is extraordinarily clever music—but it’s the polar opposite of sounds to stroke your chin to.
