On »Eremos«, Siavash Amini travels a wasteland. The Iranian artists scouts quiet soundscapes in four laps. Drones drift through them like squalls, strumming spectral chimes. Synthesizers wither away, turning into analog static, as if a record was corroded by wind and weather. Amini traverses hostile lands. The inspiration for his voyage were texts by the medieval philosopher Ibn Sina: »When thou proceedest toward the Orient, there first appears to thee a clime in which there is no inhabitant: neither human beings nor plants nor minerals. It is a vast desert, a flooding sea, imprisoned winds, a raging fire«, an excerpt attached to the promo states. When journeying on, one will find metals first, then plants, then animals, then humans. Ibn Sina disguises a cosmological hierarchy as a travel account. His theory, according to historian Kurt Flasch, did herald »a new epoch« of thinking. Ibn Sina was read enthusiastically in the Latin realms. Via Thomas of Aquin, this conception of the world would seep into the doctrine of the Catholic church. Today, Ibn Sina is often considered a reminder of the Islamic heritage of Western civilization. Siavash Amini, however, is not prone to pleading for multicultural harmony. If humans have anything in common in his world, it’s the experience of indifference. The cosmos doesn’t care if we live or die. It only offers opportunities to delight in abstract noises.
Eremos
