Uncoupling the misted rural past from the mad urbanity of the crystal present, on his debut solo album ‘Ahvaz’, Prague-based Iranian multi-instrumentalist Arash Ghasemi redraws the line between reality and mirage, memory and premonition, and crafts a new wellspring of fantasy and dream.

The artist’s particular light shines brightest from his stringplay: a different technique, a different place of emphasis along the guitar’s range is shown on each composition. Many-hued emotions are unearthed, each explored deliberately, yet the questions posed remain unanswerable: Ghasemi doesn’t draw the listener to a single conclusion; holding up a bare mirror, a decorated frame, you are invited to see the shape of your own reflection, and cast your judgement. Revisiting, different spectra appear on the surface; the album’s impact evolves in the changing lights of many days. It answers, with translucence.

It is music for physical or spiritual journey, ordained with magnitude, a grand sense-of-place, and the irrepressible presence of the blues. Wraiths of clichés appear, in the same way that all living things are formed from the consequence of four biological compounds: the signs of life, familiar and imaginary, are here, recycled into new permutations. Ghasemi’s measured use of sampled voice and performance — Farhad Safari’s whirling Tombak, the tangible ghosts of Forough Farrokhzad and Sohrab Mohammadi — provide a guiding human presence in the dense fogs of introspection.

Ancient memories of tales by the fire glimmer in the hushed voices and coiling electronics: a desert at night, stars above pierce down, and fade in the first yellow gasps of an approaching storm, the camp shaken awake; a garden, a fountain of light in the middle of a dark maze, clear water, hallowed peace; the sea stirring from standstill to dervish; raw emotion, potent and corrosive, that sears what it touches and leaves it changed; a white curtain flowing in a pale silver light, memory that negotiates truth with the present.

Collection: Řehole / XION

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