In This Space We Leave

The above is an excerpt from the documentation of 44-minute mixtape In This Space We Leave, produced by Abbas Zahedi, in which he samples ambient sonics from New York based musician Saint Abdullah, mixed together with his own spoken and lyrical verse.

Zahedi and Saint Abdullah initially started working together to make a soundscape for Zahedi’s first solo exhibition, How to Make a How from a Why? at the South London Gallery in 2020, to which this cassette mixtape became an accompanying publication. Both sound pieces were created over the course of Zahedi’s postgraduate residency at SLG, with the artists exchanging found sounds from Iranian field recordings, eulogies, poems and wider media. Reminiscent of a sonic diary, the tape explores Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The mixtape, much like the process of grief, is non-linear in its ebbing back and forth.

In this Wave of Infrasonica, the vocals from the tape have been transcribed from the analogue audio into text. In much the same way as the original documentation for the cassette – where we see a video of the tape playing rather than listening to a digital stream – this shift in format by Zahedi expands the resonances of the track, whilst retaining the integrity of the original source materials. Through an additional process of ‘trans-scribal’ exegesis, the poetics of Zahedi’s audio are broken down further, with hyperlinked sections revealing some of the multiplicities pulsing through this non-linear set of sonic soliloquies.

____________________________________________________________________________________

.
.
.

fight for the rights to my jugular veins
come near so you can hear me complain
to the blood being juggled now by my veins
blood
keep my heart strong
immune from these
speak struggle so fluent
inaudible

************

گپت بگو بعد بیا تو
گپت بگو بعد بیا تووو
از وقتی که ما بچه بودیم
we were bathed in elements
fading, fading, fading, fading
fade
milk and honey infused the walls of her womb
offerings I bring
milk and honey infused the walls of her womb
خاموش
روشن بپا
can you hear the words of god, الله or اهورا
?
nah
this feels far more familiar
بفرما
speak with ease
across neo-diasporic axes

this pride of praxis emerges
from reenactments
medieval whisper / modern day madness
streams of smoke
that drown the horizon
چندتا گپ بگو بر هزاران
گفتار حضرت بلخ
چه کسم من
ای او چه کسی بود؟
پر از دود
that’s how مامان used to set the tone
instil a sense of mood
before transmitting: درود بر درود
the translation of:
یکی بود و یکی نبود
is that: there was once one
at the same time there were none.

once upon a time.

************

[Laughter]

[Laughter]

************

that what they want from us?

CLASH

that what they want from us?
deliver that just just won't we just
just hold back brudda-man I know it's ju...
hold back brudda-man I know it's ju...
hold back brudda-man I know it's
not just about their F16s
chips that lie under mobile screen
coming here after this indie scene
’til it's about money money men go green
’til it's about money money men go green
concert full of ruptured lung n spleen
have you wiping the floor with ur self esteem
insomniac
living the dream
where have you gone and
what have you seen?
lagoons of luxury dem a’ social stream
where the angels are flying to find and
tapping to admire n like me
they say that they feel me
in the bars of the bedoun
shisha dens / underground rooms
where we inoculate the love and terror you breed
into agars of smoke
petrified one way valves
that keep the outside out

turtles can fly when ballistic mystics
fill them with shells
then they send them to die
from the other side you see that the promise of wine and wives
are all lies
primitive algorithms
updated
ad infinitum-mad infinitum
ad infinitum-mad infinitum
ad infinitum-mad infinitum
ad infinitum-mad infinitum
ad infinitum-mad infinitum
ad infinitum-mad infinitum
ad infinitum-mad infinitum
ad infinitum-mad infinitum
ad infinitum-mad infinitum
ad infinitum-mad infinitum
ad infinitum-mad infinitum
ad infinitum-mad infinitum
ad infinitum-mad infinitum
finna’ turn stare into glare upon screens
looming luminous suns upon laps & palms
rappers turn into poets to decipher their psalms
and that's when the cypher become صفر
we tend towards zero, cease to exist
pave way for that which unites us all
under primordial perennial heritage
such is my thesis of emphasissssssssss

in a synthesis of ancestral baggage
Where bilbo baggins appears as a savage

fear not for the death of mod cons
for them, I have prepared a libation
brewed upon a maternal tongue
[Saint Abdullah: WhatsApp message]
darde tou dele dele āsheghe man
az poshte safeye Hu āshegh shodam
ey ahle haram bar zeere alam
mano mibini chejoor man sar be delam?
ye chizi begoo dige bāham bereem
ye chizi begoo dige bāham bereem

& take a dagger to the heart of
your smart phone screen
badda’ rip it apart
unveil the unseen o’da’
micro chips and the macro lies
they attack my attention
left paralysed
I reside on a side of constant collide
of a mind with a million fatalities
I have no idea my brudda what that mean

literally I just stare at a screen
I’m a literary, all i do is read
these statistics mess with my news feed
& so my literacy don’t allow me to see
beyond a worldview that occupy me, me , me, me, me

************

So I said fuck them
and anyone else who said
don’t speak of the past.

at first, I was excited by the freedom this offered;
to be civilised, instead of just cultured.
I felt that I could now sit within a canon of formalistic forms and formulations.
a place in which identity no longer functions.
because my past is heavy, it is too much of a burden
people can’t relate to its particularities, the punctum of its weight
they can’t see why I would choose to wash the walls and floor of a gallery with rose water.
I mean if I had chosen to work with piss, then they could say: “Ah Yes! We have an entire tradition of thisssss… from Diogenes to Serrano… not forgetting all the Pollocks and Brian Enos.”
but they cannot relate to a past in which I washed the dead corpse of my younger brother with an infusion of myrrh and rose water.
a coming of age ritual, that was intended to make me a man, because there was no time to be a feminine-orphan-boy-child.

I have been told that speaking of the past is bad form, improper etiquette,
so I speak of lemons instead.
I speak of how Deleuze’s refrain was borne out of Nietzsche’s eternal return, a cyclical expanse of time, in which the past is forever (re)lived.
I even made my own version, the Live-Archive; about how technology works to both canonise and revive packets of data, into networked streams of blah blah…
but still, my past is a problem,
let’s speak of Fluxus, Kaprow and Duchamp instead:
because my past is rose and stem – bloody and red
passed down by cinnamon tongues
that would shoot for the sun as they watched
vultures descend upon their dead
I come from all manners of fuck and dread.
from pieces of earth that swallowed everything I ever loved
so I beg you… to tread gently

and next time you speak to the ground

please ask if it remembers me

.
.
.

************

____________________________________________________________________________________

Audio © Saint Abdullah and Abbas Zahedi. Artworks © Abbas Zahedi
Cassette © Abbas Zahedi and the South London Gallery, 2020

Complied by Abbas Zahedi with the sounds of Saint Abdullah.
Words by abbzah. Mastered by Glyn Maier.

Published by the South London Gallery in an edition of 200.
Supported by the Paul and Louise Cooke Endowment.