Pouya Ehsaei

There

LP (E172)

 

Belgium £16.50 (including postage)

Europe £18.50 (including postage)

Rest of world £23 (including postage)

 

Limited edition of 200 copies

Mastered by Jacques Beloeil

There, Pouya Ehsaei’s debut album,
processes samples of traditional Iranian
music to reveal the rage hidden beneath
its melancholia.

 

Pouya Ehsaei is an Iranian sound artist
currently residing in the UK.

​

—
Reviews

While every instrumental album is 

open to interpretation, some beg to be discussed. Pouya Ehsaei’s There is one
of them. This ambitious work from the Iranian sound artist introduces Iranian music samples, then pulverises them
with processing and electronics. If this work arose from outside the nation, it might be questioned, but its authenticity
is never in doubt. If anything, the music comes across as inside journalism from 

a native observer.

The samples are heard in plinks and plonks, typically at the beginning of tracks, dissipating like individual droplets in a downpour. But sub-melodies hide throughout the work, inhabiting the background like serfs in the presence 

of a king. At times, all that can be heard is their low-level hum, a choral echo, 

a repressed populace, a buried pride. Ahmad Shamliu’s prison poems come across as radio chatter, sound and fury,
dropped transmissions whose tone 

bears the weight of their visceral power. And over it all, like a mist of regret, a fog of indecision, a cloud of unknowing, 

an electronic shroud blocks out the light, whitewashes the history, substitutes

itself for the truth; and nothing stands in its way.

Richard Allen at A Closer Listen


Engrossing debut album from Iranian sound artist, Pouya Ehsaei, sublimating samples of traditional Iranian music 

to “reveal the rage hidden beneath its melancholia.” There was produced

in 2010, using fractured and brutally
processed instrumentation indigenous 

to Iran to isolate a palpable feeling of tension articulated with a timbre
unique to the artist’s background.

In the course of its six pieces we perceive a stark and grinding sadness from his aerated arrangements, gleaning elusive emotions from a rich, whisked swirl of glistening tones that remain dangerously high in the mix, sustaining and imparting a perpetually heightened state of sensitivity that either makes each ornate shimmer and glisten cut like

a piano string garotte, or accentuates

the feeling of frustrated detachment and

confusion in the two pieces employing Ahmad Shamliu’s indecipherable

reading of poems written whilst in prison in 1954. As listeners, we’ve long been drawn to the deep melancholy of recordings created or informed by this region, from Muslimgauze to Honest Jon’s archival collections, thru to recordings by Dariush Dolat-Shahi or Touch’s Sohrab. Understandably,

we’d fileThere in that precious pile.

Boomkat