The world does not always arrive as a coherent picture. Sometimes it comes in fragments: a face, a gesture, an image that refuses to settle into meaning. I find myself lingering over these impressions, listening for something that the eye cannot quite explain. Much of my music begins there.
When I was making Iconophobic, I was drawn to the idea of estrangement from images—from the familiar signs through which we recognise and organise our surroundings. The album’s title gave that unease a name. I imagined what might happen if those signs lost their authority, and sound were left to describe the world in their place.
I once spoke of this impulse in the language of mania. Looking back, the label seems less revealing than the tension I was trying to express: an imagination unsettled by what it sees, yet sustained by an abundance of energy, curiosity and hope. In music, I could give those apparently incompatible feelings room to exist together.
A world heard from within
In its review of Iconophobic, Sea of Tranquility heard “claustrophobic visions” and “an aching emptiness,” connecting the record to my life in Tehran. Those descriptions recognise something in the album that I cannot separate from the circumstances of its making. Yet darkness is only part of what I hear in it.
There is also pleasure: the exhilaration of an unexpected sound, the sudden intimacy of a melody, the freedom to follow an idea beyond the point where it can be neatly explained. Composition lets me hold these experiences beside one another. A passage can feel confined and still contain the possibility of release; a dissonance can trouble the ear and draw it closer.
Instrumental music leaves much of this unspoken. It does not require a single image or an agreed interpretation. What feels desolate to one listener may feel spacious to another. I value that uncertainty. It allows the world I have composed to meet a world I could never have composed for myself: the listener’s.
DPRP cautioned listeners to tread carefully when entering Iconophobic. I understand the warning. The record offers few assurances that the ground will remain still. But its unease and its tenderness belong to the same landscape. That landscape is mine, and I remain at home in it.