ALIZADEH, SABA - Scattered Memories

" 2020 repress. On his debut album Scattered Memories, the composer, musician, and true master on the Iranian spike fiddle kamancheh Saba Alizadeh blends his instrumental virtuosity with spherical electronics, samples of Persian music instruments and field recordings from his hometown Tehran. Born in Tehran in 1983 as son of the world-renowned tar and setar virtuoso Hossein Alizadeh, Saba Alizadeh studied the Iranian spike fiddle with Saeed Farajpoury and Keyhan Kalhor, plus photography and later experimental sound art with Mark Trayle at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles. His musical activities that lead him all around the globe for performances (amongst others, at Carnegie Hall) branch into two different areas: on the one side Alizadeh is a highly-reputed virtuoso on his traditional instrument, on the other he likes to approach music from a more experimental/technological aspect in his electronic/electro-acoustic pieces. This not being enough, he founded Noise Works in 2014, a platform and label for organizing experimental concerts and for the transfer of knowledge of music technologies among young Iranian musicians which makes him a central figure at the forefront of the current, very vivid Persian music scene that gained a lot of attention through artists like Siavash Amini, Porya Hatami, and of course Sotewho included a track by Alizadeh on the compilation Girih: Iranian Sound Artists (2018) that he had curated. In 2018, Alizadeh self-released his debut Scattered Memories on CD in Iran which now, in a reworked version, sees its deserved worldwide release on vinyl. Over the course of ten tracks, Alizadeh melts his two musical worlds into one: tradition meets modernism, eastern sounds meet western production, folklore meets contemporary electronics. An album that will appeal to an open-minded "world music" audience as well as fans of current streams like ambient or drone in its most subtle forms. 180 gram vinyl; Includes download code." - Karlrecords.