An otherwise middling exhibition on sound art recordings at the Hamburger Bahnhof turned up several discoveries for my January listening, none more incredible than Girih: Iranian Sound Artists, a four-album compilation released in 2018 on vinyl and cassette tape.
Despite having enjoyed parts of Sub Rosa’s 2007 compilation Persian Electronic Music: Yesterday and Today, I, in my perfect ignorance, had no idea Iran was even now such a fertile country for avant-garde music, but I was humbled by the breadth and unpredictable beauty on display in these pieces, more than 40 of them by musicians living both in Iran and the Iranian diaspora, curated by the Iranian-American composer and sound artist Ata 'Sote' Ebtekar. (Ebtekar, who also co-curated Persian Electronic Music, was born and has sometimes lived in Germany, possibly explaining the complication’s appearance in Broken Music Vol. 2: 70 Years of Records and Sound Works by Artists, a very German-focused exhibition organized around the history of a defunct Berlin record shop called “gelbe MUSIK.”)
Sound art and self-defined electronic music are hit or miss genres for me, but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered such a high frequency of hits on any complication album in any genre. It’s not just “full of gems” and moments of compelling sonic weirdness; the project is united in attitude and sensibility in a way that suggests intense, ongoing collaboration among dozens of independent artists (some of whom are Ebtekar’s former students or occasional collaborators). Listening to the albums over the past week, I’ve felt submerged in a deep-pocketed scene of mind-boggling eclecticism and talent.
In the liner notes, written by contributor Sara Bigdeli Shamloo (SarrSew), the compilation’s individual pieces are described as, or compared to, girih, the interlaced strapwork patterns found across Islamic art and architecture. To make a girih, one assembles different geometric shapes and lines until a satisfyingly ornate pattern emerges. The comparison suggests a parallel with the additive qualities of a lot of electronic composition: a girih is “a pattern to which one could keep on adding particles and details until it eventually becomes a complex, indecomposable system, a multi-layered design that has infinite detail yet is still a form that resembles the whole.”
Girih can be composed using geometric longhand, a painstaking process, or—it is speculated—through the use of “girih tiles,” which are thought to have emerged in the 12th century and consist of five shapes that can be manipulated to create an immense diversity of patterns without the mathematical knowledge otherwise required of traditional strapwork. The tiling system can create patterns that are aperiodic—meaning they are not symmetrical in any linear direction and cannot be reduced to a symmetrical pattern—and they can even be nested, such that each layer of pattern contains larger and smaller versions of itself, in theory without limit.
Such complex “quasicrystalline” systems would not be mathematically described until the 1970s, and the five-tile method that may have been used to create aperiodic patterns like those covering the walls of Gunbad-I Kabud, a tomb in Maragha, was only discovered, or re-discovered, in 2007. The otherwise irreducible pattern was found to require a bowtie, a rhombus, a pentagon, an elongated hexagon and a decagon shape. From simple forms, endless complexity.
I would struggle to find those tiles, or to classify the fractal-like and aperiodic girih in Girih: Iranian Sound Artists within any genre beyond “electronic”. Some songs feel like techno, others like new music, still others minimalist or hardcore or, in one case, Kraftwerk-inspired. Many of the artists have light online footprints or none at all. They share certain hard-to-define qualities of texture and a sensibility of space. Their soundscapes are never cluttered or abrasive in the way I sometimes find self-styled “electronic music” nor do they get lost in the repetitive and listless wheatfields of “ambient music.” Moving between symmetry and asymmetry, order and chaos, they occupy four never-boring, frequently transcendent hours.
The compilation was the inaugural release for a new music label, Zabte Sote, run by Ebtekar, and was distributed internationally—although not in Iran, where state attitudes toward electronic music are ambivalent and sometimes hostile, and where in recent weeks political dissidents have been executed as part of a government killing spree. I can’t find any reviews of the compilation online, although the linked Guardian profile notes a fact the complication makes clear, that “increasingly, Iran is becoming recognised as a hub for some of the world’s most vital, forward-thinking experimental music.” Shamloo’s liner notes describe the influence of Iranian experimental electronic musicians on the global scene as approaching a window in “Lyapunov time,” the scale that describes when dynamic systems becomes chaotic. What better description of a rapidly complicating pattern, or a people’s uprising? “After all,” Shamloo writes, “isn't this transitional state of a chaotic system—this cryptic blend of order and disorder—the most productive path towards equilibrium?”
This week marks the publication of the first issue of The Dial, a new online magazine of culture, politics, and ideas with a focus on locally sourced writing from around the world. I’m proud to be part of its team of editors. Issue One: Egg concerns reproductive justice and features reported dispatches, literature, and interviews from Argentina, Turkey, Korea, Poland, and France (and a forthcoming story from Ghana). I hope you’ll read and subscribe.
xo,
Ben