Iranian composer Siavash Amini has signed to Lawrence English’s experimental Room40 label for his new solo album, Serus. 

The release is inspired by night. “I became interested in different definitions of what night is, our perception of it, and what night means physically to us as well as symbolically,” Amini says. 

In the process of writing the music, after nights of not sleeping and intoxication, Amini suffered from a nervous breakdown, culminating in three days in hospital. While there, he reflected on the words of Maurice Blanchot who proposed the idea of “other night,” meaning that every night is two nights—the night the body spends in sleep and the night the dreamer spends in dreams. This led him to recognise “night as something we experience as ‘the night of sleep’; it is night that we resist in sleep by way of dreaming,” he explains. 

Slipping in and out of consciousness, he felt himself “far away from all my surroundings and at the same time being very attentive to some details in the objects around me,” he recalls. “It was as if my body and mind where in an in-between state. I can only describe this as being distant or more precisely being in the dark. Objects and people showed themselves out of proportion and mostly dim.” 

He describes this sensation as “Serus,” meaning that there was a sense of familiarity in some feelings and emotions that he had towards some objects, like sensing he knew them but not exactly from where or when. “It was as if my body was resisting sleep and my sleepy mind was resisting being awake, only to dream of another type of the world that I could be awake in,” he adds. 

Using textural electronics and post-classical arrangements, Amini asks the listener to dwell in the “dark” of sound and forgo the sensory certainty of light.

Earlier this year, Amini collaborated with Matt Finney on a new album for Opal Tapes. 

Tracklisting

01. A Recollection Of The Disappeared 

02. Semblance

03. All That Remained Pt.1

04. All That Remained Pt.2

Serus LP lands August 2, with “A Recollection Of The Disappeared” streaming here.