Rather than destroying or attempting to destroy our hearing, the sound is patient, and slow, and powerfully evocative. They have opted to break apart the compositions themselves, leaving a ghostly afterimage—a whisper on the wind.
The Brightest Winter Sun is the latest collaboration between Iranian artists Siavash Amini and Umchunga—a duo whose creative companionship seems as natural as it is tonally surprising. Both musicians have a solid grounding in classical composition, and have spent many years on the Tehran circuit compiling soundscapes that blister at the knotty edges of ambient and drone—where classical strings are likely to collapse into funeral, synthetic dirges; and where rushing waves may accelerate into tsunamis of noise. In 2016, the duo joined forces during Tehran’s SET Festival to deliver what was, by all accounts, a ferocious and unrelenting slab of drone.
With their latest release—out on London-based label Flaming Pines—the pair have taken a somewhat different approach. Here, Amini and Umchunga dial down the intensity and try instead a coaxing, unsettling act of sonic obliteration. Rather than destroying or attempting to destroy our hearing, the sound is patient, and slow, and powerfully evocative. They have opted to break apart the compositions themselves, leaving a ghostly afterimage—a whisper on the wind.
In this way, the release is properly a funereal undertaking. The project on which the musicians embarked involved reinterpreting late 18th century and 19th century compositions, and depriving them of their tonal development by isolating particular phrases within these works and pursuing them to the point of collapse. In this way the artists have raised the dead; albeit as shadows. Deliriously slow fragments of sound slither out from Amini and Umchunga’s careful working of loss; pulverising and reducing them until what are left are traces only, albeit traces that have a newly assumed complexity. There is certainly an element of the graveside here—of sounds slurring, lurching, and crawling like ghouls out of the crypt. And yet, despite that, they are not messing around. There is nothing of the B-movie here; no Addam’s Family fun. These are serious and genuinely unnerving constructions that demonstrate new ways of thinking about musical interpretation as a form of deconstruction.
Writing in 2012, the late cultural critic Mark Fisher argued that, by 2005, “it was becoming clear that electronic music could no longer deliver sounds that were ‘futuristic’”. Instead, it must necessarily become spectral—an act of hauntology. What takes its place, instead, is the sonic emergence of ‘disintegration’. With their devastating duet, Amini and Umchunga confirm much of what Fisher was writing about. On the track titled “1828” (it is telling that the musicians have eschewed real titles, or references to specific composer—destroying the nuances of the history on which they draw), the collaborators slowly unwind haunting piano into a grotty and bone-shaking meal of rugged noise. History is obliterated; and so is the future that plunges into it.
The Brightest Winter Sun is available on Flaming Pines.
