LABOURfeat Hany Mojtahedy is a newly formed collaboration that unites the computer music of HATAM with Persian/Kurdish vocalist & songwriter Hani Mojtahedy and percussionist Colin Hacklander in a remarkable synthesis of traditions and practices. This bold new work presents itself as a lament, telling an allegory of global complicity with strange and dark forces, and engages with ‘oil’ as a ‘narrative lubricant’, a ‘hydrocarbon corpse juice’…

nine-sum sorcery features visuals by Evelyn Bencicova and 3D artist Enes Güç (c/o Synthetic Studio) with graphic design by Zeynep Schilling. nine-sum sorcery debuted at Berlin Atonal’s main stage in August of 2019 and draws inspiration from Sohrab Sepehri’s modern poetry and Reza Negarastani’s theory-fiction book titled, Cyclonopedia which imagines oil as a sentient being. nine-sum sorcery’s epic structure situates three traditional songs in alternation with three distinct audio-visual chapters; the songs are sung in Farsi and Kurdish and the a/v chapters unfold under the following titles: The Wheel, Cyclone and Xerodrome.

During the verses, the enigmatic electronic music of HATAM provides the base for the masterful and emotive vocals interpretations by Mojtahedy. The onstage musicians operate jointly as sorceresses, conjuring massive eruptions of sculptural digital sound, voice and percussion, giving rise to the monumental audio-visual chapters, of which the visuals unfold in recurring form: original graphic illustrations of specific occult imagery give way to journeying 3D animation videos which are abstract yet evocative, finally arriving in the final section of disembodied digital voice and epic transcendence.