NICHOLAS BURMAN
You recently graduated from the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen. How has your education influenced your practice, compared to before you enrolled?
SOHO REZANEJAD
It felt natural to practice my work without dividing my studies and practices. It was an opportunity to practice my honesty inside of a curriculum.
BURMAN
How has your creative process changed since the making of Six Archetypes?
REZANEJAD
Lots of throwing away and letting go...
BURMAN
Could you talk a little bit about the transition from working under the Angeles pseudonym to being "yourself"?
REZANEJAD
I wanted to boil down the abstractions, distill the material to know what would stay. The clearer the narrative, the less of a need to cover it with second skin. To keep one name is appealing to me, because it decisively installs an audience to identify with how we mature with our material, revealing updated versions of ourselves. I felt a pseudonym would interrupt that.
BURMAN
Was that change charged with any particular intentions?
REZANEJAD
At some point you commit to your narratives and no longer require a pseudonym to make a narrative. At least that’s where I’m at with my work. Building characters, scores, titles, compositions, and so forth, is something that emits the world to me. It’s like being in a dream with endless portals. You dream one dream, and enter infinite works of the imagination... and it organises itself.
BURMAN
Is concrete imagery something you bring to the table while composing, or more an accident of the work?
REZANEJAD
I switch off my head when I work and that is very important to me. It has to be accidental so I can relate to it. When my head is switched on, the work is usually no good. That said, the images perform their way into communication very naturally, because they're not forced. My inexperience is the main instrument and this approach helps me feel a comfort with the unknown.
BURMAN
How was presenting Crow Without Mouth at Berlin Atonal?
REZANEJAD
It was a very assuring experience to tell a story on a stage like that (Kraftwerk). I feel thankful for the amount of ambition that was put into it, coming from the festival staff, my video director and performers. The audience too, were so generously attentive. It was very touching.
BURMAN
Could you summarise the play for MusicMap readers?
REZANEJAD
The play was assembled in 7 acts with 5 performers, who individually evolve from animal to man, from man to angel. By becoming angel, the characters must deflower a garden. This way, God will approach them, where they in return make intimacy with God.
BURMAN
You also recently performed at GAMMA as part of SHAPE's showcase there, how was that experience?
REZANEJAD
Russia is complicated. The oligarchy shows from the moment you step into the visa centre until you arrive to the venue to set up gear. My love for the people is unconditional despite of its difficulties getting there.
BURMAN
What books have you been reading while composing Honesty Without Compassion is Brutality ?
REZANEJAD
It took three years to make, so the books are confusing to collect a memory of. The record was mainly influenced by Joseph Campbell (Myths to Live By), An anthology of contemporary Scottish poetry edited by Duncan Glen, Rilke (The Dark Interval, Book of Hours, and various poems), Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), Hildegaard Von Bingen (Book of Divine Works), Susan Sontag (Regarding the Pain of Others).
BURMAN
You've founded your own label, Silicone Records, to release music through. Are you planning on releasing material by other artists via that channel?
REZANEJAD
It resulted after continually being declined by labels. It was really only set in stone because I needed to release my material. Maybe when I’m 50 and working on a farm.
BURMAN
The Idealist is a concept you're strongly associated with. What, at the present time, is your understanding of "the ideal"?
REZANEJAD
I’m not sure if something so fragmented can come into definition. If you follow the evolution of Joker, from the medieval-renaissance eras to the golden age of cinema reaching today’s fiction, his nature is to warp into archetypes fitting for our times. I like to think of ‘the ideal’ this way. When we think of our ideals, they so violently trace a time. Whatever the ideas may be, they fetishise the intensity of a time. And that time becomes a stem of evolution. That way, idealism is the pinnacle of time.
As of right now, if we’d have to personify my idea of the ideal, her main quality is that she is the catalyst of the theatre hall. Without her, there is no play... there is no framework for the imagination. And what is so incredibly appealing about her is, that you never fully know her, because her entire identity consists of shifting characters. As you light the torch on her, she changes into new form. And for as long as she exists, she will never fully be revealed. That way there is no possible way to monopolise her.
