REVIEW (DIVISIONS IN PARALLEL)
Max Schaefer | dec. 08
furthernois.org
In veering away from the saturated noise savagery of previous works, Seattle-based composer Kamran Sadeghi third full-length is an example of immaculately engineered sonic sophistication. A sense of musicianship and an applied intelligence of the sound and feel for the piano is rendered apparent, as Sadeghi splits its sharp report, adjusts its frequency and pans it across the stereo field. Along the way, drastically panned E-bow leave fluttery trails of sonic after-images, which form a network of cross-connections with the ghostly, sub aquatic assemblage of crackles and delicate chimes.
Asides from the virtuosity in the interweaving of these forms with considerable subtlety, certain tenderness is shown in the due attention paid to the spectrum of possibilities inherent to this area of minimal electro acoustic experimentation. Sadeghi considers a wide variety of them, both in-themselves and in the respective manners in which they fit into or expand upon the forgoing developments.
The album thereby oscillates from works such as From The Well, with its slow motion electronics and soft hum that concentrate on nuance and subtlety to pieces of fuller, to others of more disruptive tendencies in a convincing manner. As such, the powerful sense of focus that seems at first predominant is more fully fleshed out, rendered malleable, and informed by other concerns. Rather than being compromised, though, this fact makes for stronger, more characterful compositions.
........................
REVIEW (DIVISIONS IN PARALLEL)
Richie Ruchpaul
The Wire #284
Iranian born, Seattle based musician Kamran Sadeghi, aka Son of Rose, has carved a niche over the last couple years sculpting tinkling drapes of simmering sound from elemental minutiae. Divisions In Parallel moves away from the concentric circles of noise on his self-titled debut and last years Top Flight into more adventurous instrumental realms.
Making use of the strings of a grand piano and a playful E-bow, it creates an arresting opening trilogy of tracks. Familiar grainy static drops into the watery textures and angelic chimes of “Triple II” before settling into a vegetative tonal din in the concluding “Triple III”. For a sound artist who veers so close to cinematic, it’s perplexing as to why Sadeghi hasn’t scored any movies to date. Midway, he switches to his trademark cyclic textures in the tantric bells of “Passage”, which carries an airy, weightless feel that would benefit Larry Clark’s or Harmony Korine’s probing verité style of film making. The ensuing 15-minute “From The Well” edges between nervy and tingling Ambience, Sadeghi’s use of the slow-swelling properties of the E-bow filtering through subterranean museums of opaque, glassy dreamscapes like a less oppressive virsion of Halo Manash’s Isolationist Ambience. Disarming Stuff.
........................
REVIEW (DIVISIONS IN PARALLEL)
Guillermo Escudero
Loop
WEBSITE
Kamran Sadeghi aka Son Of Rose es un músico, compositor e ingeniero de audio residente en Seattle quien ha estado trabajando en el campo de la electrónica desde 2000 y ha editado tres álbumes, su debut homónimo en 2005, “Top Flight” [Dragons Fly Recordings, 2005] y “Divisions in Parallel”.
En este disco entrega una composición minimal con sutiles armonías, drones, brillantes tonalidades obtenidas del piano y cuerdas y abstractas texturas hechas a partir de sonidos análogos y digitales.
Sus composiciones van desde los timbres, clicks y la quietud hasta un espacoio intenso llenos de drones y una amplia gana de tonalidades.s.
........................
REVIEW (DIVISIONS IN PARALLEL)
Mike Olliver
Smallfish
WEBSITE
This second release from Seattle's excellent Dragon's Eye Recordings comes from Kamran Sadeghi working under the name Son Of Rose. Once again the aesthetics of the artwork and music are of the highest quality and the packaging really is lovely... simple use of classic typography, lovely photography... very much the less is more approach that I find so appealing. The 7 tracks that make up 'Divisions in Parallel' are constructed using grand piano strings, Ebow and computer and the diverse range of tracks really brings to mind the best of labels such as 12k, and/OAR or Sirr-ecords. Yes, really, it's that good. Beautifully deep and sculptural sound design is combined with a deft touch on the arrangements to give you a sense of intimacy with the work that's instantly accessible and surprisingly warm sounding. The work of Taylor Deupree certainly springs to mind and there's something incredibly pleasing when you discover that the whole CD is based on improvisations with no studio trickery... just live manipulationsof beautiful sounds. For fans of the aformentioned labels this really is a release to savour and, yes you've guessed it, it comes *highly* recommended. Absolutely superb.
........................
REVIEW (DIVISIONS IN PARALLEL)
Alan Lockett
e/i magazine
WEBSITE
Kamran Sadeghi is more a dealer in shimmering and sustaining micro-tones, and his latest recording Divisions in Parallel seems to document sounds in transit towards, but staying shy of becoming, full-blown music. In this respect, Sadeghi’s Son of Rose is less a musical enterprise and more of a sonic travel operator, vaguely shepherding his sounds towards finding design and harmony, but without spelling the route out too clearly so they can stray interestingly along their chosen pathways and find interesting tangents and by-roads. He engineers a felicitous encounter of grand piano strings and E-bow via DSP intermediation which finds articulation in contours evoking terrain in an experimental ambient expanse roughly mapped out between Sirr and Kranky, or and/OAR and 12k. Opening in sparse tinkles, the sound stage gradually builds into a thin liquid drone infused with fibrillating droplets and aqueous timbres like minute bells in melting motion (“Triple II”) before a microsonic bio-mechanic sine-drone takes over for the lowercase minimalism of “Triple III”. The 18-minute “From The Well” shifts from slow sustain-swells in a gauzy rotation, choreographed into tonal balletics glimpsed as if through a smeared glass darkly. Engrossing. Compositions suggest the secret inner life of sounding objects aspiring towards a cryptic melodicity in quiet and drifting soundstreams. These eventually find satisfying semi-static consonance on the closing “Eleven Eleven".
........................
DECIBEL FESTIVAL
Sean Molnar
Signal to Noise
The Experimental Showcase was an oasis of minimalism. All four artists, Yann novak, Son of Rose, Richard Chartier and Taylor Deupree, opted to perform without visual displays, and the calm of the darkened theater forced the audience to focus completely on the sound emanating from the speakers on both sides of the stage. It brought to mind Stan Brakhage's approach to exhibiting his films. He said simply the he is a filmmaker. If you want narrative, read a book. If you want sound, listen to music. If you want to watch film, watch film. he forced audiences to appreciate his art for what it was, not what they wanted it to be.
Taylor Deupree's set was a hauntingly beautiful minimal soundscape that would have been equally at home at the Ambient Showcase.Yann Novak took a field recording of a machine noise and programed it into a long series of seamless permutations. Son of Rose's set stood out in that it was distinctly tactile amidst sea of computers. Using ebows on the strings of a grand piano, he manipulated the vibrations electronically or used them to trigger synth sounds that were in turn manipulated - a sort of electronically prepared piano performance that was truly experimental instead of impenetrably weird.
........................
2006 MIXTAPE (INTERVIEW)
Michaelangelo Matos
Paper Thin Walls
WEBSITE
Of course a city with as many tech programmers as Seattle is going to have loads of terrific electronic musicians. 2006 was a damn good year for them, too, from tech-house producer Bruno Pronsato’s tongue-in-cheek sensuality to the warmly cockeyed techno of Jeff Samuel (recently relocated to Cleveland, alas, though his Step was recorded in the Emerald City) to the 13 artists on Memex’s Cumulous compilation, a smart overview of the dronier, more experimental end of the city’s circuit-bending activity. “Crossings” leads off the comp and pretty much delivers everything you might want from it—shifting layers of aqueous drone that evokes, in no particular order, looming sunrises, long overhead shots of a church organ in a field, Tron scored by Boards Of Canada, ladybugs running through a maze, Terry Riley’s preferences in stereo panning, the mouth-feel of frozen margaritas and dozens of records with the same basic idea only not done this well. Which is, might as well be basic about it, an amazingly rich and pretty drone. Which is enough.
Kamran Sadeghi (a.k.a. Son Of Rose) on “Crossings”
Your bio states that you “actively [explore] the use of electronics and recording techniques in contemporary music, with an emphasis on computer synthesis as a live instrument.” To what extent is a track like “Crossings” “live,” per se. Was much of what we hear spontaneous, or did you try a lot of things and utilize the best of them?
Spontaneous. Of course I sometimes have a palate of prerecorded or synthesized sounds to choose from when I’m not processing a "live" instrument, but the actual composition or placement of sound was, and is in most cases, spontaneous.
You do a fair amount of live performing. What role would “Crossings” play in a situation like that? Is a performance for you more about improvising with elements of finished work, or do you present things more straightforwardly?
I try not to mix up my live performances with my recordings—I try and keep it seamless. I try and only record what I can do live. I need to be able to build a piece from scratch while in a live setting. If it is strictly synthesis then I try and have all of my synths at a value of 0 and build the composition from that value based on my reaction to the P.A. during sound-check, the room and my state of mind. If it is using an acoustic instrument then I try and allow the source sound that I’m pulling out of that instrument manually to be present in the piece at one time or another so that the audience—if willing—can hear the source sound before it is colored with computer processing.
“Crossings” is the opening track of a compilation. Was it something you had been working on or something you created specifically for this project?
Both. I had played with this piece previous to the request but hadn’t really given it much attention until the project was presented to me. It wasn’t specific to the project, but if it wasn’t for the project then the piece wouldn’t exist. This was also one of the inspirations for the title.
........................
AUDIO VERITE (TOP FLIGHT)
Darren Bergstein
e/i magazine
WEBSITE
Son of Rose (aka Kamran Sadeghi) tickles the auditory senses much in the same way as Carsten Nicolai and the whole Raster-Noton crew. Waves of hyperactive pinprick dances, interruptive dialtones, and banks of computerized stratocumulus clouds inform the nine ‘ware-housed tone poems comprising Top Flight. Adapting the meaning of his artistic guise, Rose’s tracks are thorny bits of agitated flotsam, the types of clean yet visceral noises Ryoji Ikeda, PanSonic and Alva Noto bathe in on a regular basis. Unlike those chaps, Rose’s tracks eschew rhythm and opt for a more sedentary posture; his thick drones, when not disinterred by walls of digital brillo, scatter laterally across the spectrum in carefully sculpted wedges of triumphant noise. A Rose by any other name surely won’t sound as sweet, evidenced further by Sadeghi’s atomizing contribution to the label’s Paper com, “Reunion,” which finds the composer’s strangulated noise loops spiralling ever upward in angelic, concentric circles.
........................
DATA BREAKER (TOP FLIGHT)
Dave Segal
The Stranger
WEBSITE
As the news of the world worsens (as it reliably does), one yearns for psychic consolation, for mental balm. One of the most effective means to those ends is through minimalist music (no, really). Granted, it's tough to achieve inner peace when tools like Rove, Rumsfeld, Robertson, Cheney, Bush, and their media apologists stalk your consciousness, but some producers are up to the challenge presented by our misleaders. Two who dwell in Seattle—Son of Rose and Yann Novak—achieve the desired effect with admirable economy.
Both laptop prodigies have been featured before in Data Breaker; they're back in the column now to mark the simultaneous release of their sophomore albums for Novak's burgeoning Dragon's Eye label, whose output's been receiving strong reviews in UK experimental-music bellwether The Wire.
--
Speaking of which, Son of Rose (Iranian-American laptop composer Kamran Sadeghi) had the daunting task of trying to better his phenomenal debut, Son of Rose; with Top Flight, he succeeds.
Whereas Son of Rose was more bass-heavy and dubby, Top Flight hovers in more ethereal realms. The disc's opening cut, the aptly titled "Spectral Spectacle," encapsulates Son of Rose's ability to conjure vast, astral depths through densely layered tones and granulated textures. On "Eventide," Son of Rose creates a brilliant constellation of silvery ambience that recalls early Orb and Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project. It's a shame that Carl Sagan's Cosmos TV series was made too early to have this grace its soundtrack. "Top Flight" could be a UFO's engine idling in the Milky Way Galaxy's furthest outpost. This is gravityless sound design of meticulous craftsmanship.
Top Flight ends with an excerpt from Son of Rose's triumphant set at Broadway Performance Hall during 2005's Decibel festival. Titled "Sudden Departures," the 25-minute piece demonstrates the multidimensional magnitude of Son of Rose's sonic arsenal. Reminiscent of work by electronic-music innovators such as Conrad Schnitzler, Gil Melle, and Morton Subotnick, "Sudden Departures" facilitates just that from grim reality. Rarely does escapist music sound so intoxicatingly cerebral.
........................
SLOG (TOP FLIGHT)
Kathy F. Mahdoubi
The Stranger
WEBSITE
Laptop composer Kamran Sadeghi’s newest release, Top Flight, appeared in Data Breaker here, but I’d like to put in a word, because Son of Rose creates some of my most beloved local music.
Sadeghi’s self-titled debut made him something of a Seattle monarch of minimalist electronic music, but minimal doesn’t seem like an appropriate description. At first listen, the components of his sound may seem delicate and sparse—arranged from the confines of a computer, but don’t be deceived. All command of faculties is soon lost to the music’s omniscient effect.
I loved the first album, but I’m finding myself more attuned to Top Flight, which sounds far more conceptual than the former. It’s like an algorithmic allegory of flight.
It seems strange that something so futuristic could provoke nostalgia, but I lived on or around air-force bases from the time I was born until I was 12, and during that whole period I was immersed in the hum of jet engines. There are aeronautic nuances captured on Top Flight that pretty much take me back to suspension in amniotic fluid.
Audio-aerodynamics are patterned throughout, like the hiss of rocket propulsion, the hypnotic revolutions of propellers, hollow metallic sounds, like pinging and riveting upon fuselages and other emanations from the gaping maws of airplane hangars. The evolution is full-spectrum, spanning from tremulous insectiform winging and the ephemeral whirring of cicadas to deep-space, nebular permutations and otherworldly hovering and pulsing.
All of these tones and textures are deftly synthesized and set on a trajectory toward the end track, “Sudden Departures,” the live, 25-minute odyssey that was Son of Rose’s 2005 Decibel Festival performance. Listen to it, and understand why Sadeghi has such a devoted local following.
........................
OZ & ENDS (SELF-TITLED)
Maxwill Oz
e/i Magazine
Seattle’s own Dragon’s Eye Recordings is not only that city’s best kept secret, they provide one of the better arguments in recent memory for the legitimacy of the CDR as recording format. Skinny clear jewel boxes shorn of tray card and booklet immediately bring Raster-Noton to mind, but Yann Novak’s label isn’t strictly an exercise in glitch politics as usual. In fact, Wyndel Hunt strikes me as a chap who’s yet to dump his Belgium EBM/Play It Again Sam stock. Fascillations fairly reeks of the swanky Euro bump ‘n’ grind so popular in those late 80s days pre-techno, slowed down and emasculated, but there all the same. It’s also shot through with test-card frequency phases and some good ‘ol fashioned U.S. grade-A prime noise for comfort, straight outta the RRR catalog. I’m there. Yann Novak himself could be any one of a dozen phonographers/field recordists, and, well, he is, thank you. He’s also got more ideas in his pinky than some of his colleagues have in all their DATs. Fade Dis/appearances just about defies easy categorization, if not criticism. A work such as “Julia With Flanking,” with its obtuse pulses, insectile thrush and burnished surfaces, puts to shame most sweathogs who labor intensely over the latest plug-in without finding a suitable plug to stick it in to; truth is, Mille Plateaux in its heyday would’ve killed for this (are you listening, dear Sirr?). Son Of Rose hath slayed me as well, his self-titled debut corrugated ambient/dronestuff that actually plays too coarse on the tongue to be, as goes the trad “ambient” definition, ignored. But it should be admired. “Baltic” goes from imperceptible blackness to snap, crackle ‘n’ pop so subtly, effectively and exuberantly your head’ll be days catching up. Then there’s Family Affair, the requisite label compilation, featuring all the above in addition to other comparés. This lot mandates Seattle be embossed on the proverbial map.
.........................
ELECTRONICA (SELF-TITLED)
Ken Hollings
The Wire
Although Seattle producer Kamran Sageghi’s parents first moved with him from Iran to America shortly after the country’s Islamic Revolution, He still grew up in a home constantly filled with the sounds of Persian folk and pop music rather than the culturally benumbing white noise of broadcast TV. The music he creates as Son of Rose may owe more to ‘numerically specific frequencies’ than rhythms and melodies, there’s a unique delicacy and poise his compositions. More like digital scrims made up of fluctuating groupings of microscopic events, all six tracks on this limited edition debut EP manage to establish precise boundaries and parameters, so that forms gently manifest themselves through the accumulated flow of minute activities.
.........................
DATA BREAKER (SELF-TITLED)
Dave Segal
The Stranger
WEBSITE
Son of Rose (Seattle producer Kamran Sadeghi) is big on sonic minutiae. Microscopic sounds loom large in his art. For Sadeghi, the subliminal is sublime. Shhh. Hear that? It's the intimate immensity of this extravagantly subtle electronic music.
The emergence of Son of Rose as a live performer in 2004 was one of our laptop scene's most exciting developments. Not since Bobby Karate has Seattle had such a compelling, inventive creator of microsound. Now Son of Rose is poised to drop his excellent eponymous debut CD on Yann Novak's Dragon's Eye label.
Sadeghi stands out not only for his intelligently designed tones and drones, but also for his Iranian background. His parents moved to America to attend college around the time of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution. "I don't think [my ethnicity] influences the type of music I make, but perhaps it influences the fact that I make music at all," Sadeghi says. "Music was always in the house and in the mood of the culture. So in that aspect, I guess it did. Instead of televisions being on, I was forced to listen to either Persian folk or pop music."
You won't hear Persian folk or pop in Son of Rose's music. However, Sadeghi was influenced by Harold Budd's 1984 ambient classic The Pearl, "for direction, but not necessarily for sound," Sadeghi observes. "Subtlety... the kind of music I make comes from fixations and the between parts of music, [not] from any kind of schooling. It comes from clearing or cleaning distractions."
You can notice the bracing results of Sadeghi's quest for clarifying purity in Son of Rose. The disc begins with "Distance," with watery, Doppler-effected drones accompanied by spectral shivers of Cocteau Twins–like guitar. The Pole-like "Velo I" is true 21st-century dub, with killer depth-charge bass and reverbed aquatic ambience. "Shadow Us" is a stunning recreation of tidal, oceanic phenomena. "Velo II" evokes perpetually blooming flower petals of gorgeous digital tonalities. So it's funny that this music derives from "numerically specific frequencies."
"I'm not doing algorithmic equations," Sadeghi explains. "I spend a lot of time listening to frequencies generated by sine waves that I apply certain values to. In a sense these numbers translate into sounds. It's like I am more of an audiophile, someone [who's] interested in how things sound through speakers. I spend a lot of time listening to different frequencies, and these frequencies are mainly generated by sine waves."
Son of Rose's frequencies have carved out a special niche in Seattle's burgeoning electronic movement. "Seattle has motivated me to continue and develop my work with its constant musical growth," Sadeghi enthuses. Good work, Seattle.