saba alizadeh: i may never see you again

With I May Never See You Again, the Iranian composer, musician and virtuoso of the Kamanche violin Saba Alizadeh will release his first album on the newly founded Hamburg label 30M. As on his debut album Scattered Memories from 2019, the 37-year-old Saba Alizadeh mixes his instrumental virtuosity with spherical electronics, samples of Persian musical instruments and field recordings from his hometown Tehran. Born in Tehran in 1983 to world-renowned tar and setar virtuoso Hossein Alizadeh, Saba studied the Iranian Kamanche violin with Saeed Farajpoury and Keyhan Kalhor, as well as photography and later experimental sound art with Mark Trayle at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles. Influenced by the conceptual approaches taught there, Saba Alizadeh's music is based on Iranian traditions and scales, only to deconstruct and abstract them in the next step. As a result, the nine mostly instrumental tracks on If I Ever See You Again inspire as sonically differentiated meditations on the subject of memory. For example, in the track "Silences Inbetween", Saba proceeds highly conceptually, when he amplifies the breathing pauses of silence in speeches of dictators from past times in historical acoustic reverberation rooms to such an extent that this silence becomes audible as distortion. The silence of the masses, "Silences Inbetween" reports, is thus by no means merely neutral sound or noise, but consists of highly charged vibrations that, amplified beyond recognition, tell of a utopia (that did not occur), a different course of world history. In this sense, it is probably a twist of fate that Saba Alizadeh befriended Andreas Spechtl, the singer of the band Ja, Panik, in Berlin in 2016, shortly before Spechtl moved to Tehran for some months as part of an artist residency. Andreas Spechtl became famous in the German-speaking world primarily thanks to his song lyrics, in which he deconstructs words in a similarly abstract way as Saba Alizadeh does the music. On If I Ever See You Again, Spechtl and Alizadeh collaborate on the two tracks "Phasing Shadows" and "Touch". Saba Alizadeh also collaborated with electroacoustic sound artist Rojin Sharafi, a native of Iran who now lives in Vienna. With her, Saba composed the track "Hybrid". Not least because of the ongoing pandemic, the two collaborated virtually, exchanging sound tracks over the Internet -- hence the title "Hybrid".