9T Antiope - Eternally Torn Between East and West

9T Antiope is a duo made up of Nima Aghiani and Sara Bigdeli Shamloo, Iranian musicians based in Paris. Nima Aghiani began studying music at the age of 12 at the "Tehran Music School", where he devoted himself to classical music and violin; he continued his training in Armenia, then in Odessa, Ukraine, graduating in Tehran at 18. Sara Bigdeli Shamloo comes from a family of musicians and writers: two of her brothers play in metal bands (hard to imagine in Tehran), while she developed a passion for rock, jazz and eventually electronic music; she graduated from the University of Tehran in Theatre, focusing in particular on composing music for theatrical productions. The two met while playing at the Tehran Camerata under the guidance of Kayvan Mirhadi, one of the leading champions of contemporary music in Iran — proof of just how much creativity exists in that country.

After moving to Paris, they decided to launch the 9T Antiope project, which over the past decade has stood out for an original and highly experimental sound whose defining feature is the absolute dualism between the two artists. On one side, Nima Aghiani crafts avant-garde compositions that drift between ambient drone and contemporary classical music, with atonal sounds that are often dissonant and rigorously non-melodic. On the other, Sara Bigdeli Shamloo's voice breaks away from the music in an attempt to find a melody born from the ruins, a harmony striving to emerge from the darkness, a kind of narrative told through words that surface from walls of noise.

In 2015 they released their debut album, Syzygys, still strongly tied to the sound of strings, which creates a typically avant-garde wall of sound ("Intro On Terra Firma"). When electronics come into play, it's on "Red Trough" that the most compelling dialogue between voice and music is achieved, while "Succumb" is built around vocal loops that recall the minimalism of Philip Glass.

In 2017 they released Of Murk And Shallow Water, an EP of just four tracks that aspires to become a small electroacoustic suite, one that clashes sharply with Sara Bigdeli Shamloo's singing.

Still in the same year, this time for the iconic French label Eilean Records, comes one of their finest albums, the first in a trilogy about separation and isolation. Isthmus tells precisely of a separation, of two souls fractured by being Iranians transplanted into Europe, at risk of losing their cultural roots and of being recognised as kindred spirits by neither Persian nor European culture. "Isthmus" can also be understood, in an increasingly topical way, as a metaphor for the two worlds — Western and Eastern — perpetually forced apart for religious and geopolitical reasons.

Sara Bigdeli Shamloo's voice asserts itself more strongly here, seemingly drawing on the dark muses descended from the high priestess Nico, who has spawned so many imitators throughout the long history of rock music. The singing of this Iranian disciple hovers over expansive electroacoustic layers that chart a path somewhere between liturgy and mysticism, between darkness and the search for light.

It's the strings that give shape to an album rich in field recordings and electronic manipulations that are never cold or abstract, but always capable of moving and communicating. The choice of track titles is intriguing, drawing on the stages of cell mitosis, an extraordinarily complex process that occurs billions of times per second in every living being. Isthmus could therefore be seen as a kind of hymn to life (a somewhat contradictory notion, since mitosis, in giving rise to two new cells, always requires the death of the original one), but it could equally be understood precisely as an isthmus — a dividing line between two worlds, between two elements once inseparable, now forced apart forever with no chance of reuniting. Ultimately, then, a metaphor for the very lives of the two musicians.

The beginning of the separation ("Prophase") immediately feels like a traumatic event, marked by a long drone of strings and priestly chanting, as if hinting at the threshold bordering a new form of life that, in order to be born, requires the death of another. Sinister strings and funereal vocal declamations continue through the following "Metaphase" and "Anaphase", while in the closing "Telophase" the strings begin to repeat rapidly, forming a hypnotic loop that overlaps with a second keyboard loop, over which the voice can weave in and accompany the strings all the way to the desolate stretching-out of the final minutes.

The second chapter of the trilogy is Nocebo (2019), their most coherent and extreme work, which abandons acoustic instruments entirely. The two long compositions, each roughly twenty minutes, metaphorically explore the human condition of isolation and claustrophobia. The first is pure, impenetrable, isolationist electroacoustic music, a journey into an alternate, timeless dimension. In the second, a voice tries to climb back up from the depths, but it's the whisper of someone terminally ill, with little that's human about it except in the final exchange, which reaches for a spiritual dimension.

2019 was a prolific year for 9T Antiope, who teamed up with Siavash Amini on Harmistice, an all-Iranian LP that can only thrill the few devotees who follow experimental music from less conventional countries, especially at a time of ever-sharpening conflict. The nightmare (sadly prophetic) of a new war — no longer cold or covert, but openly declared — underpins the album, which fuses two opposing words: "To Harm" and "Armistice". The title perfectly captures the ambiguity and the state of limbo in which the Iranian population has lived for years.

The foundation of the four tracks is essentially contrast, the ultimate tool for processing the feelings experienced by Sara Bigdeli Shamloo, Nima Aghiani and Siavash Amini. Contrast between hideous electroacoustic vortices and gentle words of peace is most evident across the seven minutes of the electroacoustic gem "Black As In Burst", where black represents the terrible explosions of weaponry simulated by Amini and Aghiani, followed by Sara Bigdeli Shamloo's radiant voice delivering anti-war lyrics about the horror it produces. The stark divide between the violence of synthetic drones and the whispered words, between the dialogues of peace emerging from the chaos, is searing — a true manifesto against the warfare the Middle East seems condemned to.

In "Blue As In Bleeding" the explosions subside, but blood flows heavily amid an electronic turmoil out of which the singing emerges angelic. The dialogue between the voice and the hideous electroacoustic upheavals magnificently conveys the contrast between the fragility of peace and human life (the singing) and the violence of armed domination (the music). Fear turns purple in "Purple As In Pain", with similar traits but more drawn out, pushing to the edges of dark-ambient. Tension grows ever more palpable, finally, in "Silver As In Silence", where the nightmare of war morphs into a premonitory dream that becomes increasingly real.

The third and final LP of 2019 is Grimace (once again for Eilean Records), a brief work (five tracks for about twenty-four minutes) but no less experimental. The symbiosis of the two components — Nima Aghiani's solid electroacoustic textures and Sara Bigdeli Shamloo's ethereal, priestly singing — remains consistent with the paths of exploration already charted in previous years. Jarring electroacoustic notes form the backdrop to a minimal spoken-sung vocal ("Dry Run"), before unexpectedly opening up into a small, almost orchestral surge of strings ("Down The Rabbit Hole"), sparse at first but gaining vital momentum step by step, recalling the religiosity found in so many violin studies by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt: arguably their best track to date.

The vocal component takes up more space in "In Hiatus", coming close to the brink of a singable melody. Another significant moment is the six minutes of "An End On Itself", an attempt to fuse strings and electronics with a voice that turns into a choir, a restless offspring of Philip Glass's choral experiments.

The trilogy that began with Isthmus and continued with Nocebo, comes to a close with Placebo (2021), which mirrors the format of the trilogy's second chapter. The two roughly twenty-minute pieces ("Danza Macabra" and "Memento Mori"), presented at the Acousmonium in Paris, liken human life to a danse macabre, much like the famous Renaissance paintings, hurling pessimistic darts through spoken-word vocals and truly unsettling electroacoustic beats in the second track.

After three years of silence, Nima Aghiani returns to acoustic instruments (violin, mandolin, guitar) on Horror Vacui (2024), a concept album built around a hypothetical goth tale, a far cry from their previous work. The most interesting elements are the use of traditional Eastern sonorities in utterly alien contexts ("Ready Player One"), the melodic vocals ("Easy On The Exit"), and the constant dissonance between violins and vocals across different registers (from the almost snarled voice of the title track) to dark-ballad-like pieces such as "Canvas Blanck," one of their finest tracks, a moment of dichotomy between the beauty of the singing and the dry, dark sounds of the guitar.

The horror vacui of the title is embodied by the house on the cover: is the house our protection, or the place where we fill every possible void in order to isolate ourselves? Not an easy album, it shows a commendable attempt at evolution and change on the part of the Iranian duo, though not yet entirely convincing.

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