Iranian-born musician and sound artist mHz, aka Mo H. Zareei’s Same Room, Another Day, released on Richard Chartier’s forward-thinking LINE imprint, is a journal of sorts, a series of subjective musical states. Created in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2021, it’s the product of a two-week span of quarantined isolation.
In keeping with the tenets of minimalist serial art, the tracks on SRAD are uniform in length, each one clocking in at exactly five minutes. The track titles, shorn of interpretive influence, are the dates of their composition, with the entirety running straight through from 04-06-21 to 17-06-21. In describing the physical setting of the work’s creation, Zareei refers to an unremarkable hotel room with a standard-issue bed, sofa, and desk. His window looked out onto a construction site populated during the day by neon-vest-wearing construction workers and whatever cars happened to be passing by. By night, the only signs of life were the changing traffic lights.
From two weeks’ confinement in such meager circumstances, Zareei has created an album that’s gorgeous and moody, contemplative and engaged. Nothing on any of the tracks indicates the impatience of cabin fever or a descent into lethargy. Instead, Zareei pulls the listener into the charged atmosphere of an artist in the midst of alchemical transformation.
The opening track from June 4th breathes and pulses with glowing, breezy pads. There’s a sense of a hopeful setting out into the unknown, albeit against a persistent, steady wind. The journey continues on the 5th with those pulsing pads leading the way, but an intermittent rain arrives in a kind of electrified, pointillist spatter of notes that bounce and gather and roll away. On the 6th, a steady, high-pitched drone flattens the horizon ahead, while shimmering waves of scorched sound boil up and throbbing waves push down. No option but to keep moving. Come the 7th, there’s an oasis, a plush, layered, braided drone on which to rest.
The album continues in this fashion, with Zareei conjuring evocative, elemental scenes and sounds, opening up glimpses of landscapes that reflect the known world while indicating unforeseen dimensions within it. The tracks from the 9th and 10th for instance, share some of the suspended, otherworldly atmospheres found on Cocteau Twins’ Victorialand, while the waxing and waning cicada drone from the 13th puts a listener back in familiar territory, even as the repeating two-note motif above it, with its shifting textures, has a disorienting effect. The scouring, granulated gusts on the 15th swirl through with a bright, frosted appearance, while the closing track from the 17th seems an amalgam of all that’s come before, a summation of styles and approaches, a look back and a look ahead to eventual liberation.
Listening to Same Room, Another Day, I’m reminded that during the early phases of the Covid lockdown, owing to travel restrictions, air quality on an international scale had gone through a dramatic change for the better – greenhouse gases dropped globally to levels not charted since World War II – demonstrating that with diminished use of fossil fuels, the planet’s atmosphere was capable of improvement faster than anyone thought possible. All of which makes me think that, inadvertently, we had begun a radical experiment in transforming the way we live by reducing and curbing the ways in which we consume. While it resulted in an enormous economic shift that hurt businesses big and small – and this is not the place to talk about the staggering number of tragic and needless deaths that resulted from Covid and its mismanagement – it was the start of a necessary change, one that could have perhaps been sustained and improved on with subsidies and innovations and sacrifice. Whatever it was we were doing, as painful as it may have been, it was working.
Same Room, Another Day, for all its many changes and moods and variations, captures for me a picture – limited certainly, and perhaps willfully naïve on my part – of our world regaining a kind of homeostatic stability and healthy flux that we may never know again.
—anothergreenkitchen.com
