The River by Ava Rasti

'The River' is concerned with how a location holds and hide memories, and inadvertently how perspective and time creates unreliable narrators. Rasti explores how memory gets reassigned, she paraphrases Heraclitus, “We never step in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and we are not the same human being.” Illustrating her thoughts she took small sequences from famous classical pieces and replayed and replayed these tiny fragments until they became unrecognisable.

The concept and music were initiated during Rasti’s artist residency at Fabrica. She would visit The Piave River, finding peace, and clarity in the surroundings. She discovered The Piave’s history - the site of two battles during the Napoleonic and First World Wars and witness to horrific loss of life. The juxtaposition of the present - Rasti and her friends at play - and the banks’ blood-soaked past, profoundly affected the musician .

The album opens with 'The River', an overview, like an aerial photograph capable of capturing all the dense layers of The Piave’s past. 'The Dead Horse', a dedication to innocent animals killed in battle, begins as a delicate, melancholy, minor key hum. Its mournful, muted, manipulated orchestration gradually building in volume and intensity. 'Wound' imagines The Piave as a fissure, a scar in the Earth’s “tissue”, altered by time and erosion. The bass strings’ shaped into sighs, sad weeping waves of harmonics.

Bowed aches mixing with an almost inaudible scraping and scratching. 'Swimming With Him' examines the courage it takes to dive into the depths of our experiences, the countering currents of memories. Fluctuating frequencies circle near and then further away, like a powerful tide going out, drawing the listener to a place of drama, unease.

'Embrace The Abyss' aims to recreate The Paive’s conflicts. Its improvised percussion is a rattle of seemingly random, organic collisions. A tumbling elemental timpani that obeys only its own rhythm, and summons scenes of terrible storms. As with all the titles on the album, it feels under gravity’s pull. At the mercy of the moon, invisible forces that are impossible to resist. Forces far older, far greater than man.

'Teardrop' consists of treated keys. Distorted trebly notes, with rough jagged edges. Signalling truth cutting through to the surface. Sculpting serenity from twisted Fennesz-like glitches, and clipped, collaged sound design. 'I Remember' uses shifting chords and tonality to evoke the sensation of shaky recall. Rasti’s fingers sometimes faltering, halting as if trying to pick out a half- forgotten tune. It’s perhaps the album’s warmest moment. The previous songs’ sadness tempered with flashes of happier times. It feels very human. Hurt but healing.

Ava Rasti
composer, pianist, and bass guitarist (*1996) based in Tehran, Iran

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