Porya Hatami seamlessly integrates his electronics with field recordings, and he seems safe, sound and enlightened in the middle of his own, private Eden in Iranian Kurdistan.
Great big important German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk says that living authentically is all about sinking oneself into the contemporary, looking for “spaces of coexistence,” the places hidden in plain sight, from our nature and our machines to our work and our play, where everything overlaps, in order to discover the consequential. There is no “us” and “them,” so to speak, only “it.”
Porya Hatami seamlessly integrates his electronics with field recordings, and he seems safe, sound and enlightened in the middle of his own, private Eden in Iranian Kurdistan. On Shallow, he wades into a “Fen,” stirring up the sediment, making swamp gas rise and lightning bugs flit, under the approving eye of a friendly rattlesnake. As the moon waxes and wanes all in the course of a single, twenty-one-minute night, his keyboard transforms from regal to playful.
“After the Rain” opens classically “piambient,” a few, plummy, repeated notes in a place on no existing map, each of which Hatami encrusts with stardust. At a shade under ten minutes, it is the shortest piece of the three on Shallow, but one of the year’s most transportive. Finally, the wind eddies round the tree trunks of a “White Forest,” a nighttime tune attracts static and one, lone cricket as clear, elegant notes curl off a tiny thumb piano.
There is no echo here, no distance at all between listener and music. The music might as well have been heard by osmosis. Shallow is a misnomer for Hatami’s music; he’s sunk chest deep.
Shallow is available on Tench.
