Ornamentalism

Presentación del Álbum

For many Western listeners, the chief revelation of this music will be its very existence in a country largely defined in news reports for its repressive tendencies. It is not only an album of electronic music but one that raises questions at the very frontiers of the art. The self-presentation of this contemporary Iranian music, all of it recorded in Tehran, rests on a couple of punning terms: the album (on the back cover) is given the subtitle "Ornamentalism," referring to the concept of Orientalism popularized by Palestinian-American writer Edward Said: the systems within Western culture that work to define external cultures as exotic and to perpetuate the colonial mindset. Further, the original compositions on which the music is based, by Iranian composer Alireza Mashayekhi, are said in the tracklist to have been "electrocuted" by the second composer involved, Iranian-German-American electronic artist Ata Ebtekar. What's going on here? The album's 13 tracks consist of electronic manipulations by Ebtekar of Mashayekhi's compositions (done with the latter's full assent), resulting in new electroacoustic works, or are they, as the cover says, merely "performances" of Mashayekhi's pieces by Ebtekar and the Iranian Orchestra for New Music? This is just one of the fascinating issues here. Others deal with the nature of the source material and of Ebtekar's treatments. Mashayekhi's compositions use an orchestra of Persian instruments, "ornamented," it says here, by a group of Western solo parts, most prominently one for a piano. Ebtekar adds a third layer with his synthesizer electronics. His treatments fall into two groups, longer works in which the electronics are the dominant partner, with either the Persian or the Western instruments coming to the fore periodically and undergoing electronic comment, and "Little Tales" in which the piano is the primary sound, with the electronics bubbling under the surface and gaining in intensity. It is hard to know what the ornaments are and what is being ornamented, and this seems to be his point, or part of it; the short biography included states that he "generates music without a specific culture, which he believes to be 'The Other Sound.'" A strong release from the consistently interesting Belgian label Sub Rosa, highly recommended for courses in contemporary music and cross-cultural studies, or for any listener interested in the same.
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