Temple of Hope

How can a sense of beauty be found amid fear and cruelty? Saba Alizadeh, on his third album now, continues attempting to answer this question and to give musical expression to the struggles going on for basic liberties in his homeland of Iran. With kamancheh (spike fiddle), strings, modular synthesizers and a no-input mixer he creates sculptures of sound that comprise traditional music, samples of news radio and song all warped and mangled. Primarily inspired by the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, Alizadeh weaves the sounds of protest and the voices of victims of state oppression into certain tracks such as ‘Plain of the Free’ and ‘You Tell Me…’, the latter featuring the last phone call from prison of wrestler Navid Afkari before his execution; it emerges slowly from a distorted echo to eventually form the closing words. More explicitly political than Alizadeh’s previous releases, Temple of Hope is both spacious and profound.