LABOUR - Die consciously

We reach out exclusively to Minneapolis percussionist Colin Hacklander and Tehran-born electronic experimentalist Farahnaz Hatam, known as LABOUR, a duo among the most active in Berlin (and beyond) with large-scale works and avant-garde collaborative performances in concert spaces and museums such as Kraftwerk Berlin, Martin Gropius Bau and Kunsthalle Zürich. A partnership that gave rise to the album “nine-sum sorcery” with Kurdish-Iranian singer Hani Mojtahedy, an experience halfway between traditional Persian esotericism and German electronic decadence. The two are also part of Atonal's latest compilation, “More Light”, which also features, among others, Caterina Barbieri, Lafawndah, Laurel Halo, Lee Gamble, Vladislav Delay, Shackleton. Hatam and Hacklander tell us about their artistic project, and everything surrounding their installations and their crew, between quotes from Persian poets, African music, venues to run, records to track down and regular slots on NTS.

According to the Persian poet Sohrab Sepehri, the spiritual guide of your collaboration, “Life is continuous saturation. Life is swimming in the water of this moment”. So, do you prefer to swim in an ocean or in a river?

Our research is, ultimately, ontological, followed by an acquired inquiry into the conditioning and mobilizing forces of the human world, the forces that shape people and set them in motion. Being in motion implies having an interest, and being an interested being means being a desiring being, while being a desiring being simply means being alive. In Sepehri's metaphor, being alive implies swimming continuously. Thinking about the material forces that guide us every day, we constantly look toward the abyss, toward a transformation, toward what pushes us further, into the ocean. The river that leads to the ocean, however, is just as interesting to us as the ocean itself. And perhaps that's ultimately the deepest meaning of this poem, of which we've also translated an excerpt from Farsi into English for you:

Beyond the seas there is a place

where windows are flung wide open to epiphany

the roofs are thick with pigeons gazing at the streams of knowledge

and every young child holds a gnostic branch in his hand.

The citizens are transfixed by a row of bricks as if it were a flame,

studying it like it was a dream they were fighting to remember.

The soil hears the secret music of your inner feelings.

Overhead phoenixes soar.

Beyond the seas there is a place

where the Sun is as wide as the eyes of the first people awake in the morning

where poets inherit water, wisdom, and light

At the center of “nine-sum sorcery” we find oil and the damage it causes. How did the idea come about?

The omnipresence of oil and fossil fuels, particularly in the geopolitics of the last 100 years, still continues and remains sinister or, at best, dubious. Obviously the effects vary and create a brutal reality in many parts of the globe, including both Iran and Kurdistan. In Reza Negarestani's book of theory and fiction, titled “Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials”, a broad and compelling part of the whole premise is the idea of oil as a sentient being, a creature born from the remains of life across vast timescales. This ancient consciousness, once dormant and now reigning over us on a grand scale, has always been present and will remain long after humans have vanished from the Earth. In this particularly apocalyptic vision, oil won't stop until civilization has been flattened and war is waged with the Sun. So we imagine this narrative is also our acknowledgment of dark forces, and our entanglement with these forces, with these non-human energies, constantly in motion not just with a single life, but with the human species as a whole. It's a vision that also spells out the desire for transformation, and even for the afterlife.

How did your collaboration with Hani Mojtahedy come about?

Our first project together was a large-scale audiovisual work, premiered at Berlin's Atonal festival in 2018, titled “next time, die consciously (بیگانگی)”, and a second time with Farahnaz, who had already worked alongside Mojtahedy herself. At the 2019 edition of Atonal, an expanded work was then unveiled together with our dear collaborators, the visual artists Evelyn Bencicova, Enes Güç and Zeynep Schilling, joined by Agf Hydra with her wardrobe full of wonderful garments. For the preparatory phase, we gave everyone copies of the aforementioned “Cyclonopedia” and came together around the ideas and form of this strange and, in its own way, epic text. Amid endless riddles, occult references, mysteries and plot holes, we eventually arrived at a particular shared interpretation centered on a pre-existing realm of great natural potential, a vessel of active diversity long before the current homogenization of society gave rise to a destructive iteration. For us, engaging thoughtfully and deeply in collaboration with other people is already a reward in itself. There's nothing more beautiful than bringing together seemingly contradictory traditions and worldviews. This particular encounter arises simply from the lived experiences and aesthetic research of everyone involved. From the meeting of kindred spirits.

Dastgah, noise, electronics: you're the only ones in the world combining these seemingly so distant worlds.

Besides our musical and artistic lives, before forming LABOUR we ran the former Berlin experimental music venue called NK, through which we created a platform for avant-garde music, including the most extreme fringes of both the underground and academic circuits. The kinds of music we've engaged with are also part of who we are. Mojtahedy is an incredible singer rooted in the traditional vocal practices of her home countries, Kurdistan and Iran. Creating with her a work as full of tension as “nine-sum sorcery” and converging on a scenario like that was therefore quite thrilling for us.

At this point I can't help but ask you for 5 albums that matter to you and are worth rediscovering.

“Florian Hecker – Sun Pändemonium”: a stunning album of computer music that embraces abstract synthesis techniques, pastel tones and glitch noise. This obsession with non-human sounds resonates strongly with our practice and aesthetic tendencies.

“Maryanne Amacher – Sound Characters (Making The Third Ear)”: her interest in psychoacoustic phenomena and otoacoustic emissions, in which the listener's ear emits additional tones in response to the tones of the music, is something truly one of a kind. Moreover, her unusual staging of sound continually emerging from different adjacent rooms, conceived for large architectural spaces, has inspired our music.

“Iannis Xenakis - La Légende d’Eer“: his electroacoustic work using stochastic synthesis is an ode to the vast and chaotic cosmos. His radical musical approach still shapes and nourishes our aesthetic choices today.

“Ndongo Lo – Aduna”: the final record released right after the untimely death of the young, legendary mbalax singer from Dakar, Ndongo Lo. Deeply inspired and stimulating, for us it's a great balance between mbalax's most emotive harmonies, sabar-based rhythms and, of course, the moving quality of his voice.

“Deftones – Around The Fur“: (only Colin answers) I was 11 years old when I bought this record and I can still play every song on both guitar and drums. It's funny how malleable a young mind is with musical input like that.

Your current and future projects.

 “next time, die consciously (بیگانگی)” is an ongoing work, a search for life and a sort of underlying mantra. We're currently working on the second iteration, conceived as a work in its own right but directly connected to the first. Then there are other things we're currently working on: a big project in Dakar with the family of sabar legend Doudou Ndiaye Rose, with whom it's a great honor and pleasure to collaborate; our residency at NTS, which currently involves friends and legends from Senegal; the music for the new work by video artist Shuang Li; our contribution to an ambitious upcoming compilation for Marcello Alecaide's REIF platform; upcoming releases for our label Studio LABOUR; several additional performances and theatrical works. In short, we never stop.

Farahnaz Hatam: how did your passion for electronic music begin? Who are your favorite electronic composers?

My first deep experience probing the possibilities of sound as an artistic medium was at avant-garde electronic music concerts at Mills College in the early '90s. A niche group of computer music graduate students, led by Maryanne Amacher and Alvin Curran, performed their compositions in weekly sessions open to the public. At Mills I was also introduced to the electronics of Iannis Xenakis, which left me with a feeling that still lingers today. What drives me to make music is the possibility of translating my ideas and thoughts into a monumental yet ephemeral sculptural object in space. My favorite electronic music composers are Florian Hecker, Iannis Xenakis, Maryanne Amacher and Sote.

Farahnaz Hatam: what's the state of art and music in Tehran right now?

What I know best in Iran is the experimental music scene, which is actively promoted by Sote, through releases on his label Zabte Sote, as well as through the annual organization of the SET festival, held in Tehran since 2015 in collaboration with ten other Iranian musicians and video artists. This scene has grown enormously over the last ten years, thanks both to the government's recently more permissive regulations on events and music production, and to the music itself being easier to share online. Bootleg tape copies are circulating a lot among young people.

Colin Hacklander: can you tell me about your experience at Berlin Atonal? Which rhythms excite you most?

All our works are site-specific, dealing with the architecture, acoustics, history and social situation of a given space. Preparing the shows for Berlin Atonal is particularly exciting because of the dynamic programming and social situation it offers, but above all because of the enormous space available. Our inaugural work as LABOUR closed the festival's main stage in 2018 and was an accumulation of all our musical and sonic interests alive at that precise moment, including percussion spatialized across three levels with 30 drummers activating scattered reverbs, giving a particular sense of depth. I'm hugely excited by Senegalese sabar rhythms, which are incredible and very complex. I admire the music of my friend Birame Ndiaye Rose, who is also my teacher, by the way. Check out our show on NTS, you won't regret it.

Colin Hacklander: I know you travel a lot and that you love Baroque music.  

Yes, I travel often. I've also played in Italy several times with rock bands I was touring with. Of course, I love Baroque music a great deal, the tunings and the instruments, especially the theorbo. I'm lucky enough to have Cesar Queruz as a friend. He's a wonderful musician, and as LABOUR we also involved him in a work we did for Martin Gropius Bau, a building in Berlin's Kreuzberg district, with the participation of Dominican artist Isabel Lewis. It was incredible.

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