Etude Ikologique is not a finalised composition, it cannot be. Rather, it is a contingent study that emerged through a stimulating exchange with the IKO speaker and the room in which it was located, on a rainy winter afternoon in Greenwich, London. In that sense, this work was composed with the speaker and the space, not for them. For me, the idea behind the interaction was to understand the speaker’s behaviour and explore its sound spatialiation affordances through a series of rhythmic, timbral, and textural interventions. Voices are mostly recorded from radio broadcasts. Throughout the piece, they momentarily reveal something to the ‘listener’. Though, their semantic aspect is always concealed due to short duration or radio interference and other events. Together, the voices tell the most amazing story. But, this story is less significant than the one told by other sounds/noises within the piece, or without.
Hadi Bastani is a sound artist/designer, anthropologist, and composer. His work examines relationships between sounds, spaces/places, forms of belonging, processes of creativity and social negotiation, and digital technology with a focus on post-revolutionary Iran. His scholarship engages with combined affordances of collaborative ethnography, sound ethnography, and electroacoustic composition in exploring, investigating, and articulating processes, stories, practices, and understandings underpinning creative, social, and historical processes. As an artist, he works with computers, synthesizers, microphones, and transducers in the context of electroacoustic compositions, improvised performances, and site-specific, immersive, and interactive installations. His interdisciplinary examination of an experimental electronic music scene in Iran (2015-2019) shed light on various social, technological, and creative processes that underpinned the scene’s emergence and burgeoning in Iran and the Iranian diaspora in the 2010s, and formed the first scholarly research on the topic.
www.hadibastani.com