Reviews

SF Weekly

Last but not least, we figured we ought to pay homage to the city's vibrant underground IDM and experimental electronica scene. Aria Rostami is a recent signee to the audiomoves netlabel (an imprint of the venerable Sheffield, UK-based Audiobulb). His recent release, Uniform,  is an ambient sound collage comprised of cleverly manipulated field  recordings, heavily reverbed upright piano, and glitchy rhythms that  brings to mind the work of Christian Fennesz, John Duncan, and Brian  Eno. Tracks like "Tokyo" and "Midori" show Rostami experimenting with the kind of soundscape design that evokes a rain-drenched afternoon in the city.

Chain D.L.K.

This second release signed by San Francisco based sonic designer Aria  Rostami titled Uniform has been introduced both as a remix album  (although this release contains just three proper remixes) and as a  follow up to his lovely debut album Form I spoke about some months ago  just because while the latter was based on deconstruction of sound, the former concerns the reconstruction of it, but this approach centered on a  totally different way of processing sound (or emotions...) could let  think about something new coming from the same source for inspiration,  the gentle and sometimes foggy slopes of Rostami's city. In spite of the  importance of some compositional aspects, what really matters in my  modest opinion is not a comparison between Form and Uniform, but the  preservation of Rostami's intimate enchantment, which has kept his  wholeness even though some matter has been processed according to different standards: psychedelic melodious breezes blow on field  recordings, delayed piano touches, percussive tingles, stifled metallic  sounds, so that all tracks sound like evoking a veiled feeling of opacified purity. It's clear Rostami's past experiences related to the  production of scores for films in many moments of Uniform, even in those ones where he seems to fill sound machines' wires with laudanum ("Memorium: The Choir", "Triagnol" - what a lovely cameo! -, "White"),  whereas in other moments his agglomerative sound (re)processing reminds  some sonic artifacts by Arovane, Boards Of Canada or Bauri ("Midori", "Tokyo").

It's astonishing the way the three remixers kept remarkably high the psychedelic level and the daydreaming emanations, being my favorite ones the treatment Shawn Dickerson reserved for "Cleare": the  mentioned remix let drip silicium and sugar from broken pipes carrying  fuel for dreams, letting resurface some past listenings of mine such as  some stuff by Norken Lee Norris, and the highly cinematic version of  "Streetlights As Fairgrounds" by Saine.