Aria Rostami // Astoria I, II & III 3xTAPE

過去にDirk EntriesやGeographic Northなどから発表しているアメリカ・NYのアンビエント〜テクノ〜IDM作家Aria Rostamiが、2022年4月に25部限定で自主リリースした最新3本組カセットです。

フィールドレコーディングを多用したアンビエントドローン9曲、2時間の超大作です。知らない土地を旅しているかのような感覚を味わえるサウンドスケープです。DLコード付属。

※ケースの形状上、佐川急便(550円)での発送となりますので、レコードとお求めいただけますとお得です

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Edition of 25. Comes with DL code

Artist statement / essay by the artist :

"I moved to Brooklyn from San Francisco in the Summer of 2017. The move was something I had been planning for a long time. There was no way I could have predicted what the cultural and political landscape of the US was going to be when I finally landed in New York City. I saved money for the move and came without a job. I was starting over in many ways - in the first few months here I was trying to get back on my career path while also working a part time job, I met the person that would eventually become my wife, I got sober, I was becoming a new person. I wanted my music to be reborn too, I didn't want to make the same things I was making in San Francisco. The first record I made in New York was called "Numb Years". It captured the stress of the country, the uncertainty of my move, the stories from my parent's finally coming to light about their experiences with racism as new immigrants from Iran - the things they never told my brother and me about until they became relevant again in the Trump era. The album captured the noise of New York City, the incredible, unavoidable noise through synths, high tempos and sounds resampled and manipulated many times over. I had never experienced a city this loud before. There was a cross street with an overhead train station I would go to on my way to work that was so loud that I sometimes would not be able to hear the music or podcast in my headphones.

As the years have gone by, I've made a lot of records while in New York. I've made electronic music, acoustic music, techno, ambient, experimental, folk - I've recorded guitar, flutes, piano, glockenspiel, harmonium, synths, melodica, sampled break beats, utilized new hardware, new software and new techniques to capture different times and thoughts in my life living here. Listening back to these recordings as I was putting albums together, I always had to contend with New York City - songs sometimes get lost in the noise of the subway or streets. Recording is much more difficult too. I've waited for far off sirens and airplanes to pass before pressing "record" plenty of times. I always have to remove the clock from the room so that constant ticking doesn't show up on the recording.

Some years ago a friend of mine who is not a musician bought a field recorder - he was just interested in capturing sounds. I told him in passing I could clean up the recordings for him, maybe even add some ambient soundscapes on top of them. It was a nice idea for both of us but ultimately, it never came to be. But it planted the seed in my mind to eventually get a nice field recorder for myself instead of using my phone or finding recordings online of places I've never been to.

Early in 2021, I finally bought a field recorder and started recording my life - just the simple things I was doing anyway. Walks to work, walks home, the office, the roof, the park by my house, a bus ride, getting tested for COVID, doing chores in the kitchen, hanging out with my wife, going to do the laundry, the ambience of my recording space and so on. New York City was no longer a contender to the music, it became the center of the work, everything else added to the recordings were just embellishments. When I listened back to the recordings on my commute, the intrusions from the outside world worked with the recordings. When I was recording environments, I paid attention to sound like I had never done before. It felt cinematic and I felt present in the world in a way I didn't typically. I'm so used to shutting it out with headphones, I rarely spend time just listening to the city as it is. It was a practice of acceptance rather than dismissal. I found that the less I did to manipulate the recordings the better - the natural world of sound didn't need an arranger. I chose to, for the most part, keep the ambient and instrumental additions to the field recordings at the same level or quieter than the field recordings, I didn't want them to be the star of the show.

I also started to realize that there was a significant perceptual difference between a field recording and what I would probably call a "studio" recording. In a studio setting, I'd typically like to capture a sound in an audio vacuum - as pure as possible. Of course with my set up that isn't entirely possible and blemishes seep in from time to time which is ok, it gives the recording some character, but this is only true to a certain extent. Errors in recording or in performance are glaring in a studio setting. This wasn't true at all for a field recording - capturing the sirens and the airplanes was the point. I started to think more critically about this difference - where was the line between the two? When does one type of recording become the other? If I recorded a band playing in a studio and they messed up, that take would be scrapped - but if I captured that same performance on a field recorder while sitting in the studio and included all of the conversation before and after that take, the footsteps and doors opening and closing between the recording area and mixing booth, then I wouldn't hear the recording as a scrapped take, I would hear it as a document of that time and it could work as an interesting recording. But where was that line? Was it in the intent of the recording or is it more gray than that?

So, instead of taking the clock out of the room when I recorded, I just left it in the room - I used it as a metronome. Field recordings will start in my home studio like on "The Last Day" and you'll hear me walking around the room with a recording of a piano I made playing from my computer speakers, then slowly that field recording gets overtaken by the studio recording, imperceptibly slow, and the ambience of the room is slowly replaced by the park by my house recorded months prior which transitions to recordings in my neighborhood and a new ambient synth is introduced as you slowly return to my home studio by the end of the song. The screeching of construction vehicles harmonize with violin on "Indescwibable Peace and Joy". Music plays from cars and shops on my walk home through Crown Heights as people talk about ketchup and yell to the city about CoronaVirus on "The Nuclear Bomb" until you settle in my home with my wife and I listening to music, washing dishes and then transporting to a tiny shore in Queens, where the waves give way to a jazz band playing on the street and church bells recorded weeks later seep through on top of shoppers pushing their carts along with bowed instruments and bells I recorded years ago. And my favorite, "Astoria" captures the sounds of Astoria, Queens from the rooftop of my workplace in January 2022 - synths come in on a minor key and transition to a major key, sweeping away like the wind on a rooftop, the years that went by to finally come to this place, the decisions, accidents and miracles, struggling and overthinking only to realize things don't always need to be controlled. " 

Artist : Aria Rostami

Label : Self released