Joshua Wicke: Full disclosure: we’ve known each other for a while; we first met while working in the theater. By now your artistic practice comes in various guises and includes sound art, audio plays, and fine art. Still, I get the impression that stage theater continues to play a role in your work. How has the theater shaped your practice, and in what ways is it present in your current works?

Nazanin Noori What has always fascinated me about theater is the constant presence of a lyrical narrative and, along with that, also an emotional one. I think that the music I produce also builds such emotional narratives. The best-case scenario is that people are open to it, and that resembles the condition of the theater: you need to be patient and open-minded enough to allow yourself to feel certain things. I keep trying to construct emotional scenarios that also tell a story, but in music you don’t need to be as concrete about it as in the theater. I still believe in the kind of theater that can and wants to achieve that. But I also face restrictions in theater contexts that I can completely ignore when working as a sound artist. All institutional pressure falls away. The interesting thing about theater, after all, is to work with the personalities and the impression of others, which then translate into a bigger whole. Acting in an in-between space gives me the freedom I need. For me, artistic work, regardless of the medium, is also always the opportunity to refer to the memories, stories, and truths that surround us and to establish associative connections.

Joshua Wicke Is it the transdisciplinarity of your work that causes friction for you in institutional theater contexts?

Nazanin Noori Yes. In these contexts, it already starts with how you begin working as an artist: usually you settle on a text that then also needs to work for the direction and the audience. Then, using this text, the stage and costumes are designed, and they are finished before rehearsals even begin. My understanding of the ideal work of art does not allow me to imagine a space before I’ve imagined the sound, or that I can think up a text before I know which voice will give life to it. If I step out of this process, I get the freedom to imagine everything in one unified cosmos.

Joshua Wicke In “Apology,” which was on show at the Akademie der Künste, and in your earlier “Ambient Room,” you re-contextualize everyday objects in a dark atmosphere. In the case of “Apology” it’s a yellow tunnel slide placed inside a sterile, stage-like space while an audio play tells the audience how a character called “Little Edgar” got stuck in there in search for the gods. In “Ambient Room” one enters a similar space in between red plastic curtains and watches a video showing a Monobloc chair burning in a vast field. In both works everyday objects figure as important props for these apocalyptic scenarios. Is this also a political approach?

Nazanin Noori I wouldn’t call myself a political artist in the sense that I describe or thematize political situations directly. It’s true, however, that I, as a human in society, am engaged with what is happening to other people around me who might be less privileged than me. It would be difficult for me to tell stories of pure happiness because I don’t experience it, and I don’t think many other people ever experience it. We constantly maneuver discourse and the feeling that the world is ending. In spite of that I would not want to only draw on the concept of nothingness in my work. I think it’s more interesting to approach it in the context of the grotesque. To even have the time to romanticize weltschmerz is a privilege of the so-called first world. In my practice, I play with this understanding of doom, induce moods through certain sounds, only to break with them in the end. I appreciate this engagement with contrasts. In “Ambient Room,” a sound, video, and room installation, you prominently hear dominant, cathedral-like drones while you watch a plastic chair slowly burning to the ground in a field, wondering if the field will catch fire too. But it doesn’t happen: neither does the chair burn down completely, nor does the field catch fire. I enjoy opening these spaces of association with only a few elements, and it goes against the ethos of nothingness. But I believe in these ruptures. I think it’s funny that artists in the doom-metal and drone scene are worried about losing their right to darkness. Dark music stays dark even if the context is absurd. There’s a text about this by Werner Hamacher, The End of Art with the Mask, that has been accompanying me for years. Hamacher describes how in tragedy the actors become one with the tragic narrative, whereas in comedy the masks keep changing so that you never know who is standing in front of you. I definitely apply these principles of seduction and code-switching, both in my poetry and my sound works and installations.

Joshua Wicke I also wanted to talk to you about noise. I get the impression that you work with different kinds of noise: in some works, the audience can experience the self-organization of sound, so to speak. I’m thinking, for example, of moments on Farce [enmossed, 2020], when melodies emerge from diffuse soundscapes. In other moments noise as radically unorganized sound seems to be at the center, the kind of noise that cannot convey meaning.

Nazanin Noori My method of sound synthesis is rather old school. I produce with modular synthesizers. Working like that is always about designed primal sounds, if you will. You’ve got the base tone created by the oscillator, which I can use to build things. In the process I modulate sounds and add effects. This form of sound synthesis is fairly profane. I’m mostly interested in how it allows me to handle the memory spaces of sound. Noise ultimately is what we hear all day: waiting for the subway, hearing a humming in our homes, the thrumming of the fridge or whatever. Repetitive, calming white noise that resembles the soundscape we listened to when we were in our mother’s belly. In my hands, this kind of sound can become something we might even want to dance to. My form of sound synthesis allows me to reproduce and to decontextualize these worlds. There are no rules for noise. For example, I can determine the length of the tracks independently of commercial norms. You can’t upload Farce to Spotify because the tracks are too long. Aside from that there are other reasons why I don’t offer my music on streaming services.

Joshua Wicke When you go through this process, to what extent are you actively designing things, and to what extent is it the machine?

Nazanin Noori It’s always different. Sometimes I build delay chains and let the machines run for days. When a synthesizer has run for two days, I have a completely different experience to when I started the modulation. Of course, that depends on what I was modulating, and in the end, it also depends on how I arranged it. I usually work with a lot of tracks. I’d say I pave the way, then something develops in a direction, and in the end, I arrange what becomes the result. I tend to record a lot of what I produce. The best sounds happen when I make mistakes. And when I forget recording them, there’s a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. I believe many producers would be surprised to see my setup, but for what I’m doing it makes sense. Certain delay chains might seem superfluous because they basically devour each other, but once the machines have run for a few days, something definitely happens.

Joshua Wicke Keeping in mind these different forms of noise, I’d like to talk to you about your engagement with Sufi musical traditions. One sound piece, which you played for the exhibition The Sun Machine Is Coming Doing at the Berliner Festspiele in the ICC Berlin, had the title “Haal” and made reference to a certain spiritual state of Sufism (“Hāl”). What is this state?

Nazanin Noori I don’t want to pretend to have the complete answer to that. In my world “Hāl” refers to a spiritual situatedness that develops out of ritual acts. “Hāl” describes a kind of release of everything worldly, a type of inner ecstasy, that is brought forth through concrete ritual acts. “Hāl” can also describe the state in which the spirit liberates itself from its earthly trappings and so moves closer to the divine. And this freedom results in a concrete, regularized construct. At the ICC I had the chance to use elements from Sufi compositions and bring them together with my own music to recontextualize them. Sufi Music and ambient hardcore—that’s how I call the genre I work in, by the way—are very similar: playing with darkness and what is danceable, liberated from the constraints of time. It was risky to use the material because I was aware that it might offend religious sensibilities. I wouldn’t say that my music tries to evoke transcendence—at the same time it would be a lie to say that I’m not interested in that at all.

Joshua Wicke Were you reluctant to work with music that clearly has religious connotations?

Nazanin Noori Yes, but my fascination for it was so strong that I managed to overcome my reluctance. All the genres I’ve discovered for myself in my adult life have an energy that I associate with the traditional Iranian music I listened to as a child. With that I primarily mean Sufi music or music in which Sufi poems are recounted or sung. The development of harmony happens mostly in the first three years. On the one hand, I grew up with VIVA and MTV like almost all kids of my generation in the West, which means I have this pop-Western conception of harmony. On the other, I’m familiar with this ritual music, which works completely differently.

Joshua Wicke The connection you make between noise and Sufi music might also harbor a thesis about noise: as a spiritual exercise to let the roaring of the world be and to refrain from narrativizing it. Perhaps there’s also an element of Pauline Oliveros’ “Sonic Meditations” in it?

Nazanin Noori Pauline Oliveros’ motivation for a healing musical practice was part of her feminist fight for liberation and she was a very talented musician. It came to a head during her retreats, with which she created spaces in which she used sound practice for healing purposes—if you want to call it that. Or of experiences that you can’t let go. It makes complete sense that most of the pioneers of electronic music were women: there was a rulebook we wanted to tear apart. I can completely understand where Oliveros was coming from. There’s a pain we want to confront, but also anger and the will to transform what exists into something else. Because it’s boring to practice what’s already been done.