Babak Ahteshamipour – Mind Flaying Flavored Flails

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Being overwhelmed with catastrophizing discourses regarding the future it’s not hard for one to catch themselves contemplating on what lies ahead in time.

Mind Flaying Flavored Flails lies between and beyond such concerns like that of the artificialization and extinction of the organic, the unending data consumerism, technocratic anthropocentrism and the barracks filled with training AIs. It is an unsettling outcry for the dark veils that shroud digitalization, an aide-mémoire for the voices of the machines that slip past our attentions while we are stuck in automation and a sequence of glitches that tremble the lagging cyber-identities which haunt our online and offline presences, dreams and nightmares.

Mind Flaying Flavored Flails is the second album by Babak Ahteshamipour. It is a departure from his previous album Specter, Spectrum, Speculum, steering the wheel towards a more abstract and dissonant direction. It is occupied with sampled guitars, pianos and field recordings, crushed into granulated bits that serve as a spicy tortilla filling, with electronics and synthesizers dueling over the last bite, reinforcing a sense of a tectonic collision of cordial restlessness and soothing hypnotic states, reassuring an accompanying spot for a breezing cocktail along the spices. The preeminent vocalization of electronics, the repetitive patterns, the non-linear compositional structures, the simulation of organic sounds and the combination of field recordings with electroacoustic textures are predominant elements of this album.

Mind Flaying Flavored Flails is eminently dark and spine-tingling but with a playful twist to it, which is furthermore signified by the wordplay at work. The title of each track provides an additional layer of hoax, tremor and ataxia for the topics it explores, yet leaves plenty of room for the listener to interpret and associate with each track in their own way. The title of the album arrives furiously, whirling itself as a medieval weapon aiming to break free of its own self-referential interpretations, contradicting the flail’s traditionalism. It acts as a doomsayer for future concerns, signifying the fact that territories are not fixed but fluid and plenty of different voices play roles in shaping their futures, just as how the boundaries between the instruments and sounds in the tracks of the album are fractured to create collective compositions with a common vision.

 

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Album Review

Occupied with sampled guitars, pianos and field recordings, crushed into granulated bits that serve as a spicy audio tortilla filling, with electronics and synthesizers dueling over the last bite, reinforcing a sense of a tectonic collision of cordial restlessness and soothing hypnotic states...

Read full review here: https://igloomag.com/reviews/babak-ahteshamipour-mind-flaying-flavored-flails-jollies
- by Robin James for Igloo Magazine