Epiphanies.
We sat in the darkness, surrounded by the wood beams and dust of the industrial attic in Zürich-West. There was an air of quiet anticipation was we waited for Remo to cue up his song on the turntable, the first track on Hallow Ground’s double album compilation Epiphanies. It was the release listening party—our first chance to hear the record in its entirety, as just a few teasers had been released to date. But before the needle dropped, Siavash Amini introduced the evening of deep listening via video from Tehran.
The common catalyst for each song—“to pursue a non-rational creative process in approaching the phenomenon of epiphany”—is not unexpected; musicians have long been pursuing the state of physicality and transcendence, searching for divinatory revelation through ritual and meditation, ceremony and sound. But Amini’s take on the composer’s role in such a pursuit was paradoxically unexpected and intimately familiar. In order to engineer epiphany through sound, it is necessary for us to look outside ourselves. When we compose, we must listen as the listener.
An epiphany for this composer.
