Barzin - In the rooms of memory, in a whisper

Over the last decade, Canada has firmly established itself as fertile ground for a wealth of intriguing musical ideas, from the post-rock surges of Godspeed You! Black Emperor to the hybrid wave sound of Arcade Fire, from the classically rock songwriting of Destroyer to the varied and at times daring sonic experiments carried out, within the independent scene, by countless bands and artists orbiting labels such as Constellation, Alien8, Arts & Crafts, Weewerk, etc.

Given this backdrop of almost endemic musical fervor, and also given the widespread tendency to cross genres and definitions in highly personal ways, the Canadian take on melancholic, intimate singer-songwriting could hardly help but take on thoroughly distinctive sonic forms, spanning a register that runs from bedroom minimalism to a romanticism steeped in soft, measured sounds.

The architect of this stylistic compendium — as multifaceted as it is effortlessly realized — is the Iranian-born songwriter Barzin Hosseini, whose solo project has now been active for over a decade, and has over time been joined by various collaborators, among whom, for renown and importance of contribution, stand out Tony Dekker of Great Lake Swimmers, Sandro Perri, and Suzanne Hancock, a female voice often employed as a graceful counterpoint to understated, always carefully measured melodies.

The idea underpinning Barzin's musical venture dates back to 1995, when, having set aside the drums he'd played for a few years in a high-school band, he "discovered" the guitar as the instrument of choice for expressing his musical sensibility.

Several years would pass between that idea and its first realization, years Barzin spent shaping an artistic persona naturally inclined toward understated expression, built around slender melodies, yet not immune to compositional cues drawn from the recent or contemporaneous worlds of slow-core and the hazier, more melancholy strains of post-rock.

The self-titled debut album, written around 2000, in fact only saw the light of day in 2003, released in Canada by Where Are My Records and in Europe by the French label Ocean Music. Recorded in mid-fidelity, it gathers eight tracks of intimate feel and generally long duration, with fairly complex structures built around light vocals and shy melodic lines, set against measured rhythms that are nonetheless not without fragmentations rooted in codeine-rock. Immediate proof of this comes with the opening "Pale Blue Eyes", a hushed, seemingly languid song, yet shot through with tremors that underscore its pained progress.

The introspective tone and the slowness of the compositions, at times bordering on stillness, stand as constants within an expressive register that is nonetheless in continuous, gradual transformation. Indeed, while all the tracks aim to create deeply intimate atmospheres, Barzin manages to shape their surface through a chiaroscuro technique in which acoustic guitar, piano, hints of electronics and faint distortions follow and intertwine in ever-unexpected combinations.

Across the album, the sound moves from the bare electronic pulse of "Over My Blue" to the romanticism of "Autumn & Moon", all the way to the ambient leanings of the closing "Sleep". Yet the by far most intense moments of this shy but clearly defined debut come with "Past All Concerns" and "Cruel Sea", tracks steeped in deep lyricism and intense emotional engagement, in which Barzin's melodic and songwriting gifts come through with real clarity. The former is a heartfelt love song, its sorrow rendered dreamlike by Suzanne Hancock's female counter-vocal, which, combined with the ethereal atmospheres, distantly recalls the refined caresses of Mazzy Star; the latter is instead a nostalgic tableau built on the interplay of distant piano notes and faint distortions, both underpinned by a dull, relentless pulse, over which the serene vocal serves as the sole unifying element.

It's precisely in such nuances that the character of the artist comes through, along with his ability to blend sound, songwriting and expressive authenticity — essential elements that are in no way undermined by the spare form and the barely-more-than-homemade production.

In the wake of the European release of his debut on a French label, Barzin began to receive positive attention across the Channel, which the following year translated into a mini album released in a run of one hundred CD-R copies by the French micro-label Hinah.

The unusual format of the release isn't its only distinguishing trait, since Songs For Hinah comes across as a collection marked by a strong sense of collaboration, stemming from the contributions — including songwriting input — of Dekker and Hancock, as well as Chris Stringer, responsible for the surprising synthetic backbone of "Just More Drugs" and, more generally, for the lulling arrangements found on nearly all nine tracks of the record.

With the exception of just three proper songs, the mini album — twenty-seven minutes long in total — is made up of instrumental fragments that pair catatonic melodies with a slow, unvarying pulse, giving rise to proto-ambient textures of a vaguely disorienting sweetness.

While the instrumental tracks still carry electroacoustic touches and slow-core cadences, always filtered through the same approach already shown on the debut album, the three songs are decidedly more varied, each exploring their shared undercurrent of romanticism in different ways: first through the dreamy electronic beds alternating with string arrangements of "Just More Drugs", then in the dreamlike, piano-only psychedelia of "A Boy With His Heart" — written and enchantingly performed entirely by Suzanne Hancock alone — and finally in the more intricate "Dream Song", a heartfelt confession of emotional fragility built on simple acoustic notes and light vocal filtering.

A brief record but by no means a minor one, Songs For Hinah provides an ideal space for Barzin to work through his sound, and — likely also due to the extremely limited distribution of its original pressing — would go on to become a small treasure trove the Canadian artist would return to in later albums, partly reworking some of its songs.

The true follow-up to the debut album is My Life In Rooms, a work that confirms Barzin's intimate streak, framing it with excellent songwriting skills and a multifaceted artistic sensibility.

The record carefully pursues the formula best suited to the introspection that comes through in the Canadian artist's voice and lyrics, now supported by enveloping arrangements that bring together hushed electronic rhythms and ambient expanses alongside guitar, vibraphone and other traditional instrumentation, which together give rise to musical structures suspended between a melancholic (though never gloomy) mood and limpid melodies steeped in an innocent, almost wonder-struck observation of both the outer and inner world.

Barzin's music indeed tends to turn inward, savouring the bittersweet taste of introspection and of an isolation into which only occasionally a ray of sunlight manages to break through. But where, say, Mark Kozelek (comparable for his irrepressible melancholy) distills his compositions down to the bare essentials of voice and guitar alone, Barzin seeks out a more layered, oblique mode of expression, in which sadness and absence only ever surface obliquely, diluted within a style that remains essential yet enriched by multiple sonic fascinations, manifesting in the use of varied instrumentation that includes a modest amount of electronics but above all orchestral elements, which lend the music's romantic drama its full weight.

To grasp Barzin's tangible stylistic growth, one need only be lulled by the looping melody underpinning "Let's Go Driving", a track steeped in a muffled, almost mystical romanticism, bolstered by vocals charged with feelings suspended between a faint adolescent naivety and a kind of placid torpor in the face of existential desolation and unease. These are the dominant traits of My Life In Rooms, recurring throughout songs of disarming simplicity, often circular in structure and shifting between different emotional and sonic registers, between passages of languid introversion and harmonic openings underscored by a solemn aura. Here too there's no shortage of shifts in tone, from the vintage organ of "So Much Time To Call My Own" to the synthetic beat of the reworked "Just More Drugs", from the unexpectedly sunny lightness of "Won't You Come" to the personal, stretched-out reinterpretation of the classic ballad found in "Take This Blue".

Particularly emblematic is the final title track, which distills the album's central theme, voicing the subtle pleasure of hiding away within oneself, in rooms safe from the outside world, while fully aware that this offers no real escape from one's own memories and emotions, irremediably ⟦Q1⟧ — a line that alone, better than a thousand words, sums up the whole of Barzin's musical poetics.

In the precious fragility of its melodic textures, in the way it's performed almost under one's breath, My Life In Rooms cements Barzin as one of the most genuine exponents of "music for sensitive hearts", aimed straight at the emotions, yet never losing sight of a personal, by-now-recognisable stylistic identity.

The album is followed, just a few months later, by a twenty-minute EP, Just More Drugs, which alongside the title track already featured on the album and two intimate recordings taken from a radio session (again of songs from My Life In Rooms, "Let's Go Driving" and a dreamy acoustic version of "Just More Drugs" itself), makes room for two previously unreleased tracks. The first is actually a surprising and extremely delicate cover of "Mistakes" by Tindersticks, whose anguished intensity Barzin translates into his own introspective, gently melancholic style; while the second, "Queen Jane", is an oxymoronic invocation of an inspiration that struggles to take shape and which, despite the lyrics, proves to need no outside spark at all, finding its origin instead solely in the artist's own sensibility and his desire to express feelings ever more openly, as shown by the fuller melodies and the liberating finale, with the electric guitar never sounding so tangible.

The same communicative intent can be found in the following Notes To An Absent Lover, an album that is, as ever, carefully considered in its writing and execution, conceived as a diary, an intimate and entirely unsentimental narrative on the themes of memory and absence. In step with the subject matter of its nine songs, the record seems to shift Barzin's focus away from simply defining an established sound and toward a more straightforwardly singer-songwriter profile, a decisive step that heightens the impact of nine songs in which the vocals and melodies become more assertive, almost as if to offset the emotional fragility running through the intense lines of the lyrics.

Every song, every note and word, marks a stop along this painfully sweet journey into absence. A path taken in an attempt to dissolve memory into countless streams of melancholy, through which pain can be made to vanish, allowed to transform into something else. Barzin leads us by the hand through melodies that are muffled yet at the same time assertive, rounding out his usual cadences, slowed with a romantic fluidity brought by the ever-present string arrangements, unspooling over notes of piano and guitar.

If the overall increased expressive confidence points to a further maturing of his songwriting, it's surprising instead to see it lead to the abandonment of near-slowcore cadences in favor of the sunny uptempo drive of "Look Was Love Has Turned Us Into". And yet, it's precisely here that the contrast becomes jarring between apparent imperturbability and the alienation stemming from defeat in the game of love, and from the loss of that beauty which allows one to rediscover the world's innocence.

The Canadian artist's progressive withdrawal into the rooms of memory is matched by the need for an intimate, airy mode of expression that nonetheless loses none of its care for enveloping sonic settings. His communicative effort, in fact, goes hand in hand with soft, direct melodies and arrangements, albeit more conventional than those of "My Life In Rooms". The album thus still succeeds perfectly in its emotional progression, offering sweet glimpses of romanticism such as “Soft Summer Girls”, “Look What Love Has Turned Us Into” and the touching “Stayer Too Long In This Place”, without doubt among the most cohesive and effective tracks ever to come from the Canadian artist's pen. Emblematic in this respect is the closing surrender to dream of “The Dream Song”, a track already released on Songs For Hinah, whose far more polished and romantic version here seems to close the circle, reworking the past in light of the present and exalting the sense of human fragility (“so I became the king of all things weak”) that is ultimately the very essence of Barzin's personality and of his dense, deeply personal songwriting style.

In 2014 came To Live Alone In That Long Summer: a skyline wrapped in haze, representing the remote, ungraspable totality of human affairs, both the known ones and all the others, while the mind basks in memories sweetened by solitude, on an aimless walk through a deserted city (the progression of “In The Morning” is particularly evocative).

This is the admirable backdrop against which the Canadian's new album is set, following the heartbreaking Notes To An Absent Lover, with a slightly less romantic but more urban feel, the kind of record about the literature of emotion and apathy that Ben Gibbard might imagine, without ever actually making it.

Dear old Barzin manages it instead, carrying his unmistakable, breathed-out “girls” on the tip of a slide guitar in “It's Hard To Love Blindly”, in the heartbroken arrangement of “You Were Made For All This”, nailing in “All The While” an opening worthy of an “April”, though without Pitchfork's blessing; and dissolving, into a sunset over the Hudson, the lost words of “Stealing Beauty”.

Aided by some of the finest voices on the Canadian singer-songwriter scene (Tony Dekker and Tamara Lindeman, aka The Weather Station), Barzin thus delivers a natural follow-up to Notes To An Absent Lover, giving it a setting that's less claustrophobically romantic and mannered, while still retracing several of the same compositional choices. A fine portrait of urban emotional loneliness.

It took nine long years for a new album of original material, and finally, in May 2022, came Voyeurs In The Dark, a disorienting record that plunges into noir atmospheres, with Barzin experimenting with obsessive, hypnotic rhythms.

The singer-songwriter remains instantly recognizable through his lyrics, always deeply intimate and bordering on the unconfessable, but he still gives his best in the more classically flavored pieces, like the splendid sway of “Knife In The Water”. The record's lean half hour flows by without a hitch, helped too by a structure in which brief instrumental interludes punctuate his songs, like a folk-tinged Mussorgsky's “Pictures at an Exhibition”, saving the best for the stunning finale: first the touching “To Be Missed In The End”, with Barzin's voice trembling as if moved to tears, before giving way to a low, dramatic piano on “Distant Memories”

A welcome return, one that can only make us hope for a considerably shorter wait until his next record.

Contributions by Lorenzo Righetto (“To Live Alone In That Long Summer”) and Michele Bordi (“Voyeurs In The Dark”)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google