Hallow Ground, a Lucerne-based label releasing music bridging the worlds of ambient, sound art and conceptual musics, prepares an LP indebted to the “poètes maudits“, or cursed poets, by Tehrani musician Siavash Amini with New York writer Eugene Thacker.
Amini, who has released two full-lengths for Hallow Ground amongst over 20 works in the past decade, collaborates with Thacker for the first time thanks to a mutual respect of each other’s work. Thacker’s “inherently philosophically charged” writing matches the gravity of Amini’s music, which attempts to both describe phenomenon of the human and natural worlds while sonically venturing into what lays beyond.
On ‘Songs for Sad Poets‘, Amini and Thacker weave a tapestry of sound and poetry together: although the 2xLP arrives with a “lyric sheet” of the poems, none of the words are actually uttered aloud throughout the album; the 8 poems — each dedicated to a writer outcast from society by choice or social pressure — constructs the words and the force of their meaning into a tangible melancholic reality through Amini’s mastery of sound.
Hallow Ground is a fertile bed of music that delves into the complexity of human experience, far beyond merely painting a single frame, and while ‘Songs for Sad Poets’ maintains a melancholic aspect, the picture is a complex one, with the pair meditating on the somewhat indescribable “fragility of the human being set against the vast horizon of climate, planet, and the cosmos”.
‘Songs for Sad Poets’ is scheduled for release 23 September via Hallow Ground. Order a copy from Bandcamp.
TRACKLIST
1. Obsidian Sorrows (For Gérard de Nerval)
2. A Quiet Glow (For Chuya Nakahara)
3. Burnt Black Eyes (For Sadeq Hedayat)
4. Demented Skies (For Alejandra Pizarnik)
5. Smoldering Stars (For Giacomo Leopardi)
6. Opulent Night (For Mário de Sá-Carneiro)
7. A Shape Forlorn (For Zhu Shuzhen)
8. Prisms of Sleep (For Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo)