About the Project
On July 2023, Ehsan Saboohi, Composer and the Post-Orientalism music theorist published his theory revolving the significance of the bass line in the methodology of Post-Orientalism music with his twenty four bass compositions for a sine wave on Noise à Noise, which was an unprocessed set of sounds.
Listen here: https://noise-a-noise.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-black-sine-wave
Saboohi invited his colleagues from across the disciplines of art (Music, Painting, Cinema and Literature) through open-calls and friendly invitations for freely developing pieces with his bass lines.
About the album
This duo has a tendency to play Jazz music with a deep insight into improvisation as a music sub-genre. In their new album they have avoided the use of electronic sound unlike their previous works. Instruments that we can listen to throughout their albums In this album, Claude and Ola have employed the piano, acoustic drums, cello and the human voice in their orchestration. The sound from modular synthesizers have aided their creativity and the process of idea development in some of the pieces. The understanding and perception of the duo from form and structure of each of the sound blocks have contributed into the formation of a delicate and esoteric dialogue between the sound of sine waves of the bass lines with other parts of the sounds.
This album is produced by the duo and based on another set of sounds by Ehsan Saboohi and Post-Orientalism music ‘Music for Black Sine Wave’. Which is a 24-piece solo-bass album, composed with a microtonal approach by Saboohi.
On Play the Black Sine Project, Claude & Ola respond to twenty-four sine wave bass lines from composer Ehsan Saboohi, veering well into free jazz improvisational territory. Largely eschewing the electronics which have long permeated much of their output, these works are rendered primarily with piano, acoustic drums, cello, and voice, with a cameo modular synthesizer appearance.
About the Artist:
Claude and Ola Aldous are experimental musicians residing in the northern reaches of New York state in the US. They have released music on the Steep Gloss, TQN-Aut, and Tone Burst labels as a duo and have performed throughout the northeast of the US. They also publish the experimental music zine periodical Deft Esoterica.
Ola Aldous, a native of Kharkiv, Ukraine, studied piano as a child at the Kharkiv Special School of Music for Gifted Children before emigrating to the US as the Soviet Union collapsed. Ola earned degrees in piano performance and fine art, finding her voice outside the conventions of the western classical world. Ola maintains an active practice as a musician and multi-media artist working in sound, paint, video, and illustration.
Claude Aldous, a native of northern New York state, has a background in electronic music composition and an extensive resume as performer, cutting his teeth in the underground hardcore punk music scene and even weathering forays into string band and bluegrass music, before graduating to experimental electronic music on the modular synthesizer and acoustic drums in the avant-garde style. He is active as an audio mastering engineer, “sometimes recordist”, and as a writer.
Post-Orientalism Statement
Post-Orientalism is a term coined by the Composer and music theorist Ehsan Saboohi to describe a music language for analyzing the aesthetics of his and his colleagues’ compositions. Saboohi defines this language as follows:
“Post-Orientalism is a modern music language that uses microtonal sounds and intervals alongside altered sound chain and block structures to achieve a post-orientalism musical piece in different acoustic and electroacoustic compositions.”
Ehsan Saboohi, in his third composition period, is looking for a different language of common Contemporary Classical music trends by taking inspiration from the philosophical-social ideas of the famous philosopher Edward Said (1935-2003).