Review: Nazanin Noori – FARCE
The plot of these two extended sides is as follows: two groups of people argue over a pothole in the road, with the event presented from the perspective of the road and then from the pothole. Whether or not this plot is actually contained within FARCE is by-the-by. The mere suggestion that it might be is a fabulous thing, sufficient to send the listener into a spin of overwrought deductions about the significance of everything they’re hearing. In itself, this process of semantic extrapolation is an analogy for Noori’s sprawling sonics: ash clouds of static, synthesisers at metallic diagonals and ritual ricochets of percussion are splayed over 80 minutes that far exceed the scale of a debate on road repair, encompassing the crackle of storms above and quakes of geothermal unrest below, stranding the listener within duration until beginnings and endings reduce to mere dots at the record’s edges.
Naturally one can’t cleanly map the story of the pothole onto these compositions. To search for the plot is perhaps to misunderstand how these soundscapes function as a communicative force: not to refine meaning into something that can be objectively comprehended, but to transmit all of the contradictions, ambiguities and inexpressible emotional states that spill over the rim of language. FARCE teems with hidden rhythms and ambiguous moods; melodies lurk like phantoms behind the chatter of electronics, while seemingly incoherent combinations of texture find symbiosis through brute persistence, pressing against eachother until it’s harder to imagine them apart. Just how arguments about the mundane are often conduits for much broader, ephemeral frustrations (is it really about the pothole?), this record seems to be forever beckoning the listener to unpick its dissonances and edge toward a richer, more complex understanding. Beautiful and absolutely addictive.
