FILM by Qasim Naqvi

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“Caught between accident and expression, it is a sound whose ephemerality makes it all the more haunting.” - Philip Sherburne // Pitchfork // Full Review - https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/qasim-naqvi-film/

“Naqvi deftly crafts bleak landscapes that seem to stretch far into the horizon, as well as into the most primal cavernous spaces.”
-Katy Henriksen // Bandcamp Daily // Full Review - https://daily.bandcamp.com/2017/11/29/qasim-naqvi-film-review/

“viscerally powerful” - Jacob Kopcienski // I Care if You Listen //
Full Review - https://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2017/09/history-sonified-qasim-naqvi-film-synthesizes-succinct-narratives/

Q2 Interview - http://www.wqxr.org/story/qasim-naqvi-naqvi-analog-electronic-architecture-for-film/

// Composer and drummer of Dawn of Midi Qasim Naqvi releases FILM \\

Film is a body of analog electronic music created for the feature film Tripoli Cancelled and the three channel video installation Two Meetings and a Funeral. Both works were created by Naeem Mohaiemen and were commissioned by Documenta 14, one of Europe’s oldest exhibitions for contemporary art.

This compact 29 minute album features 10 of the 18 total pieces Naqvi composed for the two films. Like Naqvi's last release Chronology (2016), Film is an homage to the Moog instrument legacy, but it goes further with the introduction of analog modular systems.

“With both films, a lot of inspiration came from faded architectural spaces, from an abandoned international airport in Greece which served as the backdrop for Tripoli Cancelled, to La Coupole d’Alger Arena; a massive feat of modern architecture from 1975 that resembles a space bubble from another galaxy.

These sites steered me in the path of psychological room tones; a music that is an abstraction of natural ambiences that you hear in large deserted spaces. On the other end of the spectrum, Naeem and I were examining some classic 80's synth-driven scores. There's a bit of a dialectic and this album hopefully falls squarely between these two poles.

With modular systems, there's something slightly unpredictable and organic in how the voltages flow between these different modules. Depending on how you get them to talk to each other and how much indeterminacy you patch. There's an inhalation and exhalation of sound and it makes them almost human.”

Film explores a multitude of shades from dense oscillations that morph and churn, to wispy resonances, to more idiomatic compositions that harken back to the John Carpenter era of synth-driven film music.

Tracklist

1.	The Cast	2:24

2.	Algiers	2:27

3.	Sputnik	2:12

4.	Non-Aligned	1:56

5.	Aligned	1:37

6.	Coupole	2:33

7.	Plane Tower	3:01

8.	Mannequin	4:03

9.	Wreckage	5:56

10.	Chronoredux	2:03

Videos

Credits

released September 29, 2017

Film was composed and produced by Qasim Naqvi, mastered by Sarah Register and is published by Erased Tapes Music.

Finishing funds for FILM were provided by New York Foundation for the Arts and the Shelley Pinz Professional Development Grant.

Many Many thanks to Naeem Mohaiemen, Documenta 14, Sarah Register, Aaron Roche, Grey Mcmurray, Ochion Jewell, Julie Blake, Lauren Clark, Emilie Baltz, Emily Keegin, Ben Sterling, Jill Strominger, Daniel Zimbler and Moog Music.

Instruments

a modular system comprised of three oscillators by Verbos, Moog and Erica Synths, Make Noise Modules, a Moog Model D analog synthesizer
and an Arp Odyssey Synthesizer

Album Cover: Production still from Tripoli Cancelled (dir: Naeem Mohaiemen, 2017), still photography by Dimitris Parthimos.

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