Blueberry
SADAF - History Of Heat
"Sadaf H Nava is an Iranian composer, violinist, and visual artist whose multidisciplinary interventions include sound, video, performance, and text. History Of Heat is an eroto-intellectual retelling of a love story. It is the scholarship of heat, and the sources of its production in the body: desire, exaltation, anticipation, fear, rage, and mourning. It is a fable circulating through the nerves, pumped and distributed by its own mythologies. Through different chapters, you follow the heroine from the initial desire to love, the sensual pull which oscillates between the grotesque and sacred longing of the flesh ("L'Enfer en pleine lumière", or, "Hell In Plain Sight"), to the sudden ghostlike appearance of the "Other" (with "Apparition") as a projection of the dream. "Animal" speaks of instinct, the smell of the beloved, already the deconstruction of the divine back into the realm of the physical. The title track sings the hesitation of love, the precipice of openness, and the invitation of the contract. In "Perfection", the pressure, which keeps the relationship on the pedestal of the absolute, stunts and paralyses love. "Tiny Engine" speaks of mechanical attachment, attachment to the lover as habit, as a second nature, and the call to the other person as a magnet. In "Ditectrice", the madness and the folly of separation spawns war and confusion. "Feed Him" follows with resignation and exhaustion. "War Text" brings forth the devastation, the peace treaty and finally the metaphysical divorce. In "Guttermoon", the vita contemplativa begins, the blood starts to cool, the scene is a ghost town. "Wrong God" similarly winds down as an ode to remorse and mourning. Finally, "Cinema Verité" closes out the album with a mistrust of "reality". History Of Heat is an experimental narrative and cinematic pastiche of all original and self-recorded material. A chaotic mix of sounds, both analog and digitally produced, recalling a warlike interpersonal breakdown. The mood established by the lyrical content of the piece is meant to be demanding, enclosing the listener within a unique and compelling cocoon of otherworldly sound. The album is framed within a discursive love story which reflects larger relational problems and interpersonal traumas. Looped vocals act as incantations woven in and out of lyrical singing and spoken word. The instrumentals embrace chaos and intensity. Improvised violin and broken-down beats complement and balance the melancholic overtones which flutter above off the grid rhythms in this charged ficto-personal account." - Blueberry
