Dreaming and daydreaming, hoping and reaching out to the imaginary. Desires are thrusts, energized charges towards the lifeblood of existence filled with willingness, curiosity, vitality and inquisitiveness. In the pursuit of dreams, barriers and obstacles appear that slow us down and throw us out of orbit, causing us to drift into the void. They bring us toe to toe with despair, affliction and enlightenment. Violent Violins Exposed is a tale of brutal confrontations which shatter pure and naive dreams and transmute them into distorted nightmares. It dives into the frolicsome innocence that is abruptly confronted with the monstrous machine of technocapitalism and accelerationism, the repressed emotions and engineered desires, and the banishment of decay from capitalist discourse.
Violent Violins Exposed is the third album by Babak Ahteshamipour. It is a twisted turn towards abrasive, anarchistic, lunatic and coarse explosive compositions blended with hidden suave, malleable and tranquil spaces that wrestle to be heard. The tracks of the album feature modular, algorithmic and interchanging rhythmical patterns combined with scattered sequencers, cosmic pads and transposing arpeggios which are delivered within hardcore, aggressive and abstract soundscapes. The ambient soundscapes are consecutively interrupted by glitchy noises, growling frequencies and ferocious patterns as if they are being canceled and choked down. Yet the ambience fights back and attempts to reemerge as resculpted sounds, arpeggiated phrases and bursts of chords that engage into conversations with the interrupting attacks. This coexistence of nuanced elements and dynamics creates a symbiotic bond that meddles with the animating bedrock forces of each composition.
Sweepingly Violent Violins Exposed has an apocalyptic and dystopian touch to it, a manifestation of Babak’s concerns regarding war, technological singularity, extractivism, the passive participation in violence and the commodification of suffering. Technocapitalism is in an accelerated insatiable hunger for raw materials, which is manifested through geopolitical conflicts and environmental degradation. This obsessive desire for technological immortality and endless production and consumption doesn't recognise decay as a universal force. They are part of a mainstream discourse that is passively imposed, singularly and collectively, by marketing and advertising campaigns, sculpting the impression that resources are infinite and capitalism is natural. A discourse that presents itself as the only way, creating a zombified numbness and a state of mental repression that terminates liveliness, creativity, benevolence and the imaginary, converting them into nihilist futility and escapist denials. Violent Violins Exposed is a memento of this state and a manifesto for symbiotic coexistence of hope and despair through a pulsing bond. Its motto is to transform our hopes and dreams into a dauntless fairy fist that has the power to puncture through the veil of despair and find new alternatives within the rifts to saturate our nightmares with vibrancy.
credits
released April 3, 2024
Music Written/Produced by Babak Ahteshamipour
Pure Data Instrument on "Ecosystemic Struggles of a Gloomy Doomy Bloom" by Jessie Onze
Mixing and mastering: Costas Stergiou at Syn Ena Recording Studio, Athens, Greece.
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