Collaging the Soundscape of Conflict

Iranian Transmissions collects the electromagnetic field of Tehran’s recent conflict into an electroacoustic experience. Using field recordings from the twelve day Iran Israel war, Parham Ghalamdar in Manchester and Abolfazl Harouni in Tehran fragment reality into algorithmic radio collages. Ta’aziyeh trumpet laments surface inside coded glitch, while sports broadcasts bleed through static like ghosts of ordinary life. Explosions sit at the edges of perception, then recede into long pockets of silence. The sounds are not organized by chronology. They form spectral interstices. The work reads as a haunted archive of pulses and voids rather than a linear record of events.

It grew from broken and continuous conversations during the twelve day Iran Israel war, held through extreme internet blackouts and constant interruptions, where philosophy, despair, bravery, nihilism, and hope collided with the noise of conflict. The sounds come from Harouni’s recordings in Tehran. Processed until unrecognisable, they hover as spectral drones and glitch textures, ghosts of their source. The dialogue between home and exile is etched into the music. One voice stands inside the event, the other at distance, both held in the same unfinished horizon.

Hyperreal Exile and Machine Testimony

The project unfolds in the space between home and exile. Ghalamdar in Manchester processes these transnational transmissions in dialogue with Harouni in Tehran. Distance becomes a creative vector. Each fragment becomes a message that crosses sealed borders. Here the machine is witness. This war torn audio is too fractured for literal narrative. Like the Sufi figure of al Haqq shattering into reflections, the truth of conflict cannot remain intact once articulated. Meaning leaks through signal fragments and artifacts. The testimony is hyperreal, an uneasy amalgam of pulse and echo that bears witness without claiming a single viewpoint.

Iconographies and Infrastructural Geometries

Harouni’s visuals echo the sonic collage. The images feel at once ancient and uncanny. Persian miniature motifs are pared to militaristic silhouettes, geometric stairs, and grid like plans. A drone hangs over a gold field as a sign, and silver leaf stairs lift into a void that reads as siege infrastructure. In the studio the visuals worked as prompts. We fed them to the instruments. Lines set rhythm, colours set timbre, silhouettes set space. The result is dialectical. Sound and image interlock. Tehran sees, the rest listens, and both press toward an unseen front line.

COVER ART

Abolfazl Harouni
135 Kilogram of Persian Poetry
Color pencil and gold leaf on cardboard
34 x 34 cm
2023