The Vienna based trio share a video for a ten minute track fusing Baluchistan musical tradition with electronic processing
“Maybe you cannot understand anything about this music,” says HUUUM vocalist Omid Darvish, speaking to Ilia Rogatchevski in January 2024 for The Wire 479/480, “but if you listen, you will understand that everything is natural, even the electronic beats. We didn't invent anything.” Iranian producer Rojin Sharafi agrees: “What I like about folk music is its openness. You can change it. Having this freedom is very attractive to us.”
The trio, completed by Chilean saxophonist Álvaro Collao León, work by breaking open traditional regional sounds and then redefining the resulting fragments through collective musical experimentation. This track “Bānzol/Āzmān”, taken from HUUUM’s self-titled debut album, draws on the sounds of the Baluchistan region and explores the ideas of an “inner dialogue between the wind inside the body and the person themselves”, as well as the themes of madness and ritual. Due to its intense narrative, the track was also the first to receive visual treatment from art collective T-ER, who described their approach to the project over email:
“When we started this collaboration, we were thinking quite intensively about how to create an environment of exchange among everyone involved. We tried to establish forms of exchange that transcend modes of translation from audio to video. We were looking to include artefacts of our individual and collective surroundings, our present conditions and intentions, our encounters and approaches, and bring them into a virtual setting that allowed us to spawn narrative worlds in a generative fashion. We 3D-scanned objects referring to the HUUUM’s ritualistic nature, and captured everyday objects in their current state. All those virtualised objects became the base material for an iterative sculpting process of collective fragmentation.”
Wire subscribers can read Ilia Rogatchevski’s interview with HUUUM online via the online library of back issues. HUUUM is released by Accidental Meetings.
