Reviews

Headphone Commute

Here’s another beautiful and totally unexpected addition to my list of recently loved albums. Aria Rostami is a San Francisco based musician, sound installation artist, and firm score composer. I’d be lying if I said that I was previously familiar with his work, but after listening to Form a few times, I decided to make an effort to find out more. Thankfully this independent release is sponsored by Audiomoves, a digital label and distribution service brought to you by David Newman (aka Autistici), the man behind Audiobulb Records, and as such is easily accessible through its professional seasoned channels. Immediately, during my first listen, I placed Rostami somewhere between the delicate glitch of Ametsub, deep bass rolls of Murcof and melancholic piano progressions of Max Richter. Do any of those make any impact on your psyche? Well, you’ll be sure to love Form then! Very cinematic in nature, rhythmic in structure, and digitally precise in its… well… form, the album explores the everyday battle of life – its unstable, unpredictable and fragile nature. Jittery percussion sets the template for ambient layers and piano chords, rising from the past to augment the present. Masterfully produced sounds evoke suppressed memories through haunting melodies, dusty loops, and archived rhythm. On the surface, Form reflects Rostami’s “understanding and appreciation for all things coming to an end“. But what Rostami maybe fails to notice, is that with this debut, he’s off to new beginnings. Easily a contender for our Best of 2011 albums! Watch out for this one! Highly recommended!

Chain D.L.K.

Some soft piano bitonal hiccups of the initial track Japanese Parisian intersecting some bumps which go by fits and starts welcome the listener to the musical microworld of Aria Rostami almost like a breeze leafing through a book, which silently helps the listener itself to look for some key explaining the entrancing beauty he's going to discover. The mental images this talented composer, whose composition sounds heavily influenced by his previous experiences with ambient pieces for film scores and installation, are as crystalline and glacial, as they've been mainly recorded during last winter; many moments, which sound hanging from contemplative raptures and soundproof daydreaming, evoke that feeling of precarious balance, entranced brittleness and harmonic delicacy, which could resurface from musical memories sketches of contemporary Japanese music (think about some stuff by Teruyuki Nobuchika, Ryuichi Sakamoto or Akira Kasemura), but tonal dynamics has often been propelled by rolling bass pulses and bleeps (a feature which is quite clear in tracks like Cleare or the lovely Klavs, where it could remind some tricks used by Murcof) or deep electronic bass notes or droning sounds, which have been wisely inoculated in the unstable piano melodies, such as in Daydream 26 or Mata Hari - my favorite track of the whole album for its strongly dramatic tension -, who could be linked to some interesting workouts by musicians such as Fennesz, Benge or Monoceros. In the final chapters of this sort of sonic narration, elements around which sonic experience has been built on look like more rarefied and impalpable: the short piece Black Tile almost imperceptibly debouches into the lake of ultra-low riverberating frequencies of Black Sands, whose recursive and loopable structure and cavernous dusk looks like a sonic letterpress of something permanent even if sometimes hidden like an old memory, the only part of this circuit which doesn't sound a "perishable" form, amidst so many bittersweet raising of transience.