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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
A Hidden Place
Sohrab
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With _A Hidden Place_ context is everything and nothing. Sohrab is a Tehran-based musician whose sense of displacement and isolation within his own country is palpable across the six ambient pieces making up this release. He is both a product of his environment and a reaction against it. This contradiction still fits a model of rebel music (punk, say), except that here the form of expression is so internalized as to represent a kind of withdrawal.
There is plenty of space in his soundscapes, where the slow reverb of chimes and the fluttering of abstract electronica punctuate solemn pauses. It is like an expression of emptiness, of faint, spectral essences occupying vacant areas. But then these spaces become filled with a more forthright presence of undulating tonal frequencies, a respite from the indefinable sense of oppression.
A few voice samples pepper these washes of sound, but they offer only glimpses of a more concrete sense of place. It is the persistent emphasis on the elusive that makes these expressions so beguiling. While there is beauty here, there is also a nagging undertow of anxiety, a reminder of Sohrab’s status as a cultural exile in his own country. (Tom Ridge, _The Wire_)
Links: http://www.touchmusic.org.uk/sohrab
There is plenty of space in his soundscapes, where the slow reverb of chimes and the fluttering of abstract electronica punctuate solemn pauses. It is like an expression of emptiness, of faint, spectral essences occupying vacant areas. But then these spaces become filled with a more forthright presence of undulating tonal frequencies, a respite from the indefinable sense of oppression.
A few voice samples pepper these washes of sound, but they offer only glimpses of a more concrete sense of place. It is the persistent emphasis on the elusive that makes these expressions so beguiling. While there is beauty here, there is also a nagging undertow of anxiety, a reminder of Sohrab’s status as a cultural exile in his own country. (Tom Ridge, _The Wire_)
Links: http://www.touchmusic.org.uk/sohrab
Sohrab (IR), born in Tehran in 1984, was seven when the Iran-Iraq war ended. His name, from an old poem called _Shahname_, means “rouge water”, which can also mean “blood”. He started a punk band with his brother and a friend, which lasted about two years before splitting. Sohrab is totally isolated in Iran, with little or no connection to what is happening there. He is currently seeking political-refugee status.