RocRast by Pouya Ehsaei

Pouya Ehsaei is an Iranian musician, audio-visual artist and performer currently residing in London. Beside his solo sound projects, he is involved in different collaborations with dancers, performers and other musicians.
He is also the composer and bandleader of “Ariwo”, with whom through improvisation and real-time processing, he explores the possibilities of Afro-Cuban rhythms and melodies mixed with electronic percussive noises, hypnotic modular patterns and psychedelic atmospheres.

RocRast plays with our perception of time. How experiencing time leads to sensations, feelings, emotions and how these become the matter that is sound. RocRast seeks to strike an image behind the eyelids. A mass of sound floating in the air, getting in and out of focus. A grumbling tunnel with bursts of fractal shapes. A stranded village, sandstorm, creaking door, drops of water. Or perhaps it strikes an image of a figure flickering in red light, broken and deformed, strumming a broken instrument that never sounds right. RocRast is about nothing, nothing but that window of time when you’re listening to it. It is a malleable mass that can be heard and seen from multitudes of angels. How melancholic, brutal, calming and disturbing it sounds, depends on your experience in the moment, there and then. 

Rocrast’s tracks are all recordings of live performances played on an all-hardware setup with a modular synthesizer at the centre. There has been minimal editing and post-production. This is partly dictated by the continuous aspect of these tracks which made time jumps impossible; and partly in an attempt to be true to the actual moment of these performances.

A label focusing on Experimental Electronic Music by Iranian Composers.

Curated by Ata 'Sote' Ebtekar

Instagram