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ARTIST
TITLE
Songs for Sad Poets
FORMAT
2LP

LABEL
CATALOG #
HG 2203LP HG 2203LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
10/14/2022

Composer and sound artist Siavash Amini collaborates with author Eugene Thacker on Songs for Sad Poets. The collection of eight pieces draws its inspiration from the legacy of the so-called cursed poets ("poètes maudits") as well as the German-language tradition of song cycles and expands the structure of the classic art song through a process of lyric abstraction. Amini is no stranger to interdisciplinary collaboration, as seen in A Mimesis of Nothingness, his 2020 collaboration with photographer Nooshin Shafiee, also released through the Swiss Hallow Ground label. But whereas in Amini's previous collaborations music and other media are set in dialogue, with Songs for Sad Poets, Thacker's poems and Amini's soundscapes are deeply enmeshed with each other. In fact, none of the words printed in the record's booklet are being said out loud on this double-LP, but rather made tangible through the use of sound. Songs for Sad Poets was born out of a mutual admiration of each other's work and it is easy to see how the musician and the writer could relate to one another artistically. The Tehran-based Amini has released over 20 albums in the past decade that probe the physical world but also search for something beyond it. His compositions draw on field recordings as well as acoustic and electronic sounds, blurring the lines between what is conventionally perceived as real or authentic and the abstract or otherworldly. The New York-based Thacker on the other hand is known as a writer whose philosophical works like Infinite Resignation read like poetry while his poetry and other literary writing is inherently philosophically charged. What unites them on this project is an interest in the idea of the fragility of the human being set against the vast horizon of climate, planet, and the cosmos that produces a "sadness without cause." The pieces on Songs for Sad Poets translate this nearly inexpressible ambient melancholy into dense and sometimes claustrophobic pieces that are marked by internal tensions and slowly unfolding dynamics. The eight poems are neither only the starting points nor just the byproduct of the compositions, or vice versa. Instead, the entire record is one single result of a coherent creative process. Clear vinyl; 12-page booklet.