A Thousand Butterflies

A Thousand Butterflies resembles a sonic personal essay, narrating both the musical adventures of the composer through her life. Aftab Darvishi, the daughter of a well-known Iranian musicologist, has a background in Iranian classical music and has pursued her musical journey by switching to contemporary-classical. Her latest record is an abstract of her miscellaneous adventures.

Just like the composer’s musical path, A Thousand Butterflies gets more complicated as it goes on to the last track. Darvishi applies subtle interpretations of Iranian classical melodies dispersed into her polyphonic music, performed by the strings and flute, leaving the listener in a joyful struggle to further discover the roots of her sound. She also benefits from different stylistic techniques to develop her musical tale, namely the presence of electronic elements in the last piece and the twist from tonality to solid hints of atonality in ‘Forgetfulness’ to describe the song’s titular concept.