Occupied with sampled guitars, pianos and field recordings, crushed into granulated bits that serve as a spicy audio tortilla filling, with electronics and synthesizers dueling over the last bite, reinforcing a sense of a tectonic collision of cordial restlessness and soothing hypnotic states.
Eminently dark and spine-tingling but with a playful twist to it
Babak Ahteshamipour is an Iranian visual artist and musician based in Athens, Greece. Mind Flaying Flavored Flails is eminently dark and spine-tingling but with a playful twist to it, which is furthermore signified by the wordplay at work, somehow disposing of comfort and seduction to talk about harsh electronica and discontent. The album begins with sort of a Guernica of sound, with bright clashing colors, often difficult listening, arty and definitely not soothing or lowering your blood pressure. In my opinion, the choice of synthesizer sounds that do not imitate traditional instruments or forms, yes my mind is flayed here, lots of different fragmented flavors, therefore success!
In this album there will be no dancing, no relaxing, just sit straight up on the rack and endure Ahteshamipour’s sense of humor. It takes gumption and nerve to push the limits past the point of pain, I can admire that, suffering for art is no vice, it usually worries everyone but sometimes it simply must be done. We have the option of listening, the artist is the only actual prisoner.
Mind Flaying Flavored Flails is the second album by Babak Ahteshamipour. It is a departure from his previous album Specter, Spectrum, Speculum, steering the wheel towards a more abstract and dissonant direction. It is occupied with sampled guitars, pianos and field recordings, crushed into granulated bits that serve as a spicy audio tortilla filling, with electronics and synthesizers dueling over the last bite, reinforcing a sense of a tectonic collision of cordial restlessness and soothing hypnotic states, and at last reassuring an accompanying spot for a breezing cocktail along with the spices. I find the most rewarding aspect is the value of a good sense of humor and an interesting range of tracks.
Mind Flaying Flavored Flails is eminently dark and spine-tingling but with a playful twist to it, which is furthermore signified by the wordplay at work. The title of each track provides an additional layer of hoax, tremor and ataxia for the topics it explores, yet leaves plenty of room for the listener to interpret and associate with each track in their own way. The title of the album arrives furiously, whirling itself as a medieval weapon aiming to break free of its own self-referential interpretations, contradicting the flail’s traditionalism. It acts as a doomsayer for future concerns, signifying the fact that territories are not fixed but fluid and plenty of different voices play roles in shaping their futures, just as how the boundaries between the instruments and sounds in the tracks of the album are fractured to create collective compositions with a common vision.
Being overwhelmed with catastrophizing discourses regarding the future, it’s not hard for one to catch themselves contemplating on what lies ahead in time. Mind Flaying Flavored Flails lies between and beyond such concerns like that of the artificialization and extinction of the organic, the unending data consumerism, technocratic anthropocentrism and the barracks filled with training AIs. It is an unsettling outcry for the dark veils that shroud digitalization, an aide-mémoire for the voices of the machines that slip past our attentions while we are stuck in automation and a sequence of glitches that tremble the lagging cyber-identities which haunt our online and offline presences, dreams and nightmares.
A sequence of glitches that tremble ::
The first sounds are uncompromising, encountering electronic experimental avant-garde electroacoustic free improvisation sound art from a Persian in Athens, and the first track is titled, “Flower Powder Contamination in Encrypted Proxy Servers” (8:58). Sometimes music can be challenging and satisfying, and sometimes there is a message in the pain. Depending on my hapless and unaccountable mood, this is irritating, a rapid pulsing tone that becomes more harsh as it unfolds. I am thinking about sabotage. I am checking the words more closely, this is not saying flower power, it says flower powder, which has a very different history than flower power, no doubt that flower dust is not good for proxy servers or related kinds of equipment.
Screaming demons, disguised as birds, crowd the area in the dark and the work is difficult, the track is titled “Installing Cloaked Plug-ins beyond the Perimeter of a Botanical Lab” (7:50). I hear lots of jungle sounds, frogs and insects and birds, dense, but sometimes there is an orchestral presence during sustained blasts, electronic woodwinds, maybe a bagpipe? This brief sound makes me think of Sun Ra from his Futurism experimental buzzer and alarm bell period of the 1960s. Meanwhile, the jungle sounds persist and have no problems with this new group of signifying instrument sounds, yet now the density is clearing up and changing complexity while keeping all the instruments and jungle bug noises, they swarm on my layers of protective hats. Now something different. I hear change. Organs rippling in the haze, “In Pursuit of the Anvil that was Fed into the Jaws of the Time Wasting Washing Machine” (6:24), vast emerging electronic keyboards, listen, I think that someone is walking at a moderate pace, not too fast not slow, I hear clattering steps grinding and skittering. We gained some miles, now I think the washing machine might be what is walking. Yes, a machine and not a servant. In the front the anvil can be heard all the way down into the mix, wham wham wham. Eventually the keyboards own the scene, the machine forms the foundation, the walking sounds are in the middle, I hear hissing metal, tapping metal, sometimes not rhythmic, other odd sounds, now it is all coming together for the fade.
The sound of this track is very difficult to listen to, then the friction is replaced by some noodling electronics, there is some smoothing out, bumping up, quieting down. The aggressive rapid pulsing tone sometimes slowly fades and then returns, and I am feeling a sense of defiance or aggression being exercised on my ears, for the composer there is triumph, for some of the audience, the pain never subsides but it does vary. This track is definitely not soothing but it is art, which justifies the pain I am enduring listening, here at the end of the track an angry electronic squirrel is scolding me.
A crushing hand works the plastic keyboard, “Deaf Omens of Doom Exercising Influence” (12:29), electronic noodling with intense and harsh tones, fast small jittering on the keys. The creature is distressed but it sings, harsh is the word so far but wait now (eventually) slowly mellowing, I catch a sort of Silver Apples of the Moon vibe, strange sparkling electronic tones in reverb. Now I think that the cat is on the keyboard chasing something, maybe a metallic moth. I think the aliens want their drone back, they seem to be in a foul mood. The hissing might be a weapon of some kind, or just pressure escaping. All the while still remaining harsh, sustained, can you endure?
The final track starts off blending a few tracks that bounce about finding a solemn pace, slow and beset with floating bits that collide and interlock in various ways, welcome to “The Void in which Ghouls are Sentenced to go When they Rob Digital Tombs” (7:23), as a climax, this is also harsh but not as painful as we have been through to get here, what is this about punishment for robbing digital tombs? I look around, there is wind howling and the keyboard flirts with melody, right on the edge. Perhaps I always wonder if the cat ever caught that moth? Relentless noodling with steam radiators and plastic pianos, some of the keyboard action is probably a flat hand mashing the notes, some of the action is melodic a tune is weaving through the steam radiators hissing and banging, or maybe some of that hiss is from a gigantic rattlesnake, not preparing to attack but just stretching, and now we are sinking into dark water in a tunnel while the wind rips past.
Babak Ahteshamipour is a multidisciplinary artist based in Athens, Greece. His practice is based on the collision of the virtual vs actual, aimed at correlating various topics from cyberspace to ecology and politics to identity, exploring them via MMORPGs / video games, social media and online with the integration of themes of co-existence and simultaneity. He has exhibited and performed at Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), New Art City (online), The Wrong (online), Sub Rosa Space (Athens, Greece), UNT (University of North Texas), Biquini Wax ESP (Mexico City, Mexico), Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago, Illinois), Milan Machinima Festival (Milan, Italy) and elsewhere. He has released music on the independent cassette label Industrial Coast (Thirsk, North Yorkshire) and on the cassette label Jollies (Brooklyn, NYC). His music has been played on radio stations such as Noods Radio (Bristol, U.K.), Radio Raheem (Milan, Italy), Concertzender Radio (Utrecht, Netherlands) and Radio alHara.
Mind Flaying Flavored Flails is available on Jollies. [Bandcamp]
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