Pedram Babaiee

Contemporary Portrait of Communication Breakdown

Imagine a world in which we could capture an abstract version of our moments, feelings, and conditions, as conceptual and passionate as they truly are. You could pin your life experiences to the world as they would live and be lived, forever. Representing such a concept may need a much greater and stronger tool, than language; an existence beyond ideas of right or wrong — the perfect combination of Love and Information.

During the last four years, I’ve been working on a personal project -my upcoming album Ruins of a Memoir- with the intention of creating a sonic image of near-life experience concepts like the one explained above.

In 2015, long-time friend and collaborator, Nikoo, asked me to work on the new theatre piece she was directing.  I was really excited about the concept, early music ideas that came to my mind was contrasting contemporary classical music with glitchy electronic textures.

From “Love and Information” contains five pieces extracted from the 60 minutes long original music composed for the premiere performance of Caryl Churchill’s play Love and Information in UMass Amherst.

There are interesting stories to be told about the recording days, from destroying a high-end microphone trying to record noise signals, to sleeping cats on my piano. But for now, I’m going to get passed all of them and just tell of a personal realization: recently when I was re-mastering songs for this digital release and thinking about all the memories of “Love and Information” recording days, I oddly noticed that every single story plus all the emotions and feelings of those days are actually captured within the recordings, in an incredible harmony of form and content. And not only they existed in my imaginations but in actual audio waveforms!

Unconsciously, “Love and Information” had become a real combination of love -friendships, collaborations, musician interactions, emotions, etc.- and information -the play script, emails, music sheets, recording process, etc.-

without being noticed. With each passing day, I’m becoming more certain that such a world described in the beginning, does exist within our everyday life. It may be covered by noisy textures, signal losses, and low-quality vibes, but those who want to explore and be present will reach deep down to beautiful layers of harmony — as it is true that beautiful things don’t ask for attention.

So, this is all about Love and Information.

Pedram, March 2018