Baghiri deftly lets the macro and the micro reflect one another on a grand scale. His music sighing, Baghiri’s light passes through you like a neutrino—with so little mass it almost goes unnoticed. In a good way.
With such a hefty amount of music available, how to choose an album by Amir Baghiri? The cynic might say, just throw a dart at his discography, it’s all much the same. The map coordinates are on the same latitude and longitude as Mathias Grassow, Tomas Weiss, the defunct Vidna Obmana, the late Oöphoi, true ambient stalwarts all, whose rainstick synthesizer music changes shape slowly as clouds and is lighter than the air that bears them.
Light Textures is nonetheless one of Baghiri’s best, an homage to the protean mind of Omar Khayyam (1048-1131 but for some reason his birth and death are set five hundred years in the future in the liner notes), author of The Rubiyat, and his fascination with both inner (philosophy) and outer (astronomy) space.
The album begins in the recent past, in the culmination of space exploration thus far (at least in the popular mind)—the moon landing. With a narration, a few aeronautic samples and a tribal rhythm that hearkens to Mongolian nomads watching the sky twinkle differently than ever before, an earthen theme tone that is reflected as “Crossing the Sky” rises ever skyward. Baghiri deftly lets the macro and the micro reflect one another on a grand scale. His music sighing, Baghiri’s light passes through you like a neutrino—with so little mass it almost goes unnoticed. In a good way.
Light Textures is available on Attenuation Circuit. [Listen]
