Biaban

CEDAR COMMISSIONS SPOTLIGHT INTERVIEWS

Over the next few weeks we’re featuring the six artists of the 2022-2023 Cedar Commissions (taking place Friday, February 17th, and Saturday, February 18th at The Cedar) in a series of interviews on our site. The Cedar Commissions is a flagship program for emerging Minnesotan composers and musicians made possible with a grant from the Jerome Foundation.

In 2022, the first year that The Cedar was open from January to December since 2019, these artists began crafting their commissions with a bit more normalcy on the horizon, but a lot of strangeness, newness, and darkness in the rearview. They’ve been composing, exploring new ideas, and assembling teams of musicians to bring their work to fruition on The Cedar’s stage later this month. Over the two nights of the Twelfth Annual Cedar Commissions, audience members will witness performances about the existential threat of petrol, the importance of protecting and embracing Somali youth, how to find meaning in the indescribable, how to listen to the song of the planet, an illustration of journeying gender transition, and a depiction of the soul-body reunion after trauma.

Our fifth spotlight interview in this year’s cohort is with Biaban (Aram Kavoossi, he/him). Biaban is an electronic musician and beatmaker. His new work for the 2022-2023 Cedar Commissions Oil and Dust is a sobering look at the omnipresent nature of oil. Inspired by the novel Cyclonopedia by Reza Negaristani, Biaban explores the narrative device of oil as sentient and ravenous, and all the while, claiming humans as dependents. Biaban spoke with Twin Cities music writer Youa Vang about the history of oil in Iran, channeling the characterization of this substance into a sound(s), and gratitude for collaboration.

“Putting it into music was an effort of collating those emotions revolving around oil imperialism — rage, paranoia, and fear — and channeling them through the machinery of computer music. I wanted to emphasize texture, through synths, samples, and effects, to create a sense that the tectonic forces of global politics can and should be grasped and engaged with on the level of individual listening.”

— Biaban

Youa Vang (she/her): Where are you at in your process?

Biaban (he/him): Close to finished. I've been working on it since August. When I started, I had a few sketches that I had been playing with before that. Now I have 10 songs, three of them feature vocals from Aida Shahghasemi, a classically trained Iranian singer in Minneapolis who’s performed and worked at The Cedar. We recorded last week. What I've been doing since then, it's been day and night trying to mix those tracks down, getting her vocals sounding as good as can be. The second track also has a bass part recorded by my friend Jonah Esty. Other than that, it's been grinding, making beats, trying different ideas and seeing what sticks. It's been a tough process in terms of finding an order for a project with such a wide range of sounds and influences. At the same time, it has this loose narrative theme of oil imperialism, so I think it's been a rewarding struggle trying to congeal all of those ideas together into something cohesive.

Youa: Is your piece very literal about oil or how did you integrate that subject into your piece?

Biaban: Yes, literally about oil. Oil and the business and politics surrounding it wield immense influence over daily life in the west and outside of it. We all need to drive or take the bus to work; it’s a basic dependency for most of us. And yet oil is discussed so obliquely in public spheres that it’s hard to grasp as a material that we actually interact with and consume every day. It’s a critical resource we all rely on, whose prices ebb and flow esoterically, whose finitude spells the end of our current way of life, that in America we feel entitled to enjoy in excess. This enjoyment comes at the price of exploitation, of the lands, peoples, social processes, and political autonomies of resource-rich, so-called ‘developing’ countries throughout the Americas, Africa, and the Middle East.

In the early 1950s, Iran’s parliament moved to nationalize its oil operations, booting out the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now known as BP) who built Iran’s first major oil facilities in Abadan and hoarded up to 85% of the national oil profits versus 15% left for the Iranian government; a gentleman’s agreement reached between the British William Knox D’Arcy and the late Qajar Dynasty. With the British unwilling to renegotiate these terms to meet the demands of Iranian workers and citizens, Iran moved to nationalize its oil unilaterally in 1951. As was the case for many such independence movements of the 1950s, oil nationalization was quickly punished. Working in collaboration with the Shah, the British MI6 and American CIA orchestrated a coup to depose Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh who enacted the nationalization, plunging the country into a political winter where hopes for economic independence and freedom of speech felt extinguished. Egged on by the British and Americans and threatened by his own dissidents, the Shah grew increasingly violent and insecure in his throne. Some argue the dissatisfaction that led to the Iranian Revolution, which has led us to the circumstances Iranians face today, stemmed in part from the 1953 coup and Britain’s denial of democratic process in Iran. But the story of oil isn’t about Iran alone, similar dynamics of resource imperialism have played out in so-called developing nations around the world. It’s also playing out in the United States today, with the construction of the pipelines such as Line 3 which stand to desecrate Indigenous lands and threaten America’s Great Lake water supply.

So oil is omnipresent but underdiscussed. What got me interested in the idea of oil as a narrative device, a device to make the substance an immediate and consequential reality for the public, is a novel called Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani. It talks about this idea that had previously been explored in obscure American science fiction and horror writing: oil as a sentient entity that's actually driving humans underneath the Earth, a viral infectious compulsion to release the fossil fuels from their eternal slumber. Thinking about oil geologically, you're thinking about ancient organic remains, the literal dead matter of organisms that lived millions of years prior to their reanimation. For this project I imagine the voice of oil, the undead fuel of our existence, as a melding of organic and machine elements, challenging our indivisibility from the substance that is coming to consume us.

Youa: Your father is an immigrant. Is that correct?

Biaban: I don’t know if he would call himself an immigrant, because he moved here temporarily to pursue an education and intended to move back to Iran after. But when he was about to graduate the revolution happened and the Iran-Iraq War began which left him stranded with more stable prospects in the US.

Youa: When did he leave Iran? Was it at the peak of that revolution? Did he talk to you about that as you were growing up? Was that a part of your life?

Biaban: He came to the US in the late ‘60s before the revolution intending to study engineering (almost petroleum engineering funnily enough), but his interests eventually shifted to international political economy. Those lenses and the political circumstances I described above inform his world view, and that has influenced me for sure. But I'm also working through my own lens, my own experience growing up in 21st Century America which is a shitshow of its own. Because I grew up torn between perspectives, everywhere I look I try to imagine beyond the perceived limitations of one single perspective or another.

Youa: Did you ever feel different, growing up with a father who was not from here

Biaban: Yeah, it was weird because it definitely influenced a lot of my life growing up, but I didn't really process it till I got a bit older. On the one hand, there's my dad's family. His siblings both moved to the US too, and I grew up outside of Washington DC, where there's a sizable Iranian community. There’s a Farsi school and a Shia mosque in the neighborhood where I grew up. I was around a lot of other Iranians and SWANA people growing up. At the same time, my mom's family is a traditional white American nuclear family. I have both experiences, and while I've definitely experienced alienation from both communities, I’ve always been aware of my cultural identity, my dad was always very proactive about that. At the same time though most people I knew at home had some sort of immigrant or non-white ethnic background where we could relate, so it wasn’t unusual.

Youa: What is your stance or your opinion of what happened in the ‘50s in Iran, and then how do you take that and put it into something music? Did your dad influence how you felt about that?

Biaban: Yeah, once I started to study and research it more, we would talk about it. It wasn’t bitterness every day, because you’ve got to keep it moving and live with your circumstances, moreso an awareness of resource imperialism and the mutability of western democratic values that many Americans don’t recognize. I was born in 2000, so my dad understood the broader context of what was going on then and was very opposed to the war, but on the other hand, I had my American family on the other side who were part of the mainstream, more inclined to subscribe to the state’s prescription of anxiety and fear. There was this tacit acceptance and justification of warfare in the name of democracy.

Putting it into music was an effort of collating those emotions revolving around oil imperialism — rage, paranoia, and fear — and channeling them through the machinery of computer music. I wanted to emphasize texture, through synths, samples, and effects, to create a sense that the tectonic forces of global politics can and should be grasped and engaged with on the level of individual listening.

Youa: Why did you choose this subject for your Cedar Commission?

Biaban: I've always been drawn to dissonance in music and things that are unfamiliar – things that challenge the environment and mindsets I grew up with. Growing up I was influenced heavily by Black electronic music, especially old UK dubstep and dnb, hip-hop, metal, hardcore, and Iranian classical music. These genres share histories and sounds rooted in dissidence, dissatisfaction, and the search for a way out of present conditions. They each approach their circumstances differently, too, employing different musical traditions, approaches to technology, and critiques of hierarchy and time as part of their sounds.

They share a potential for music as political narrative, an attention to physically feeling and moving with music rather than passively observing it, and an imperative that the cultural and political heritage of music is something to be recognized, explored, cherished, and interacted with.

Youa: When you started working on your commission, did you have stuff already, or did you start from scratch?

Biaban: I had a few sketches because I'd been thinking through these ideas a little bit.

Youa: Who did you work with?

Biaban: I worked with Aida Shahghasemi, a classically trained Iranian singer and musician who lives in Minneapolis. She did vocals on three songs, and then my friend Jonah Esty did bass on the second song of the project.

Aida sings in Farsi, and we landed on two poems in Farsi for her to interpolate by the poet Mehdi Akhavan Sales. He was active in the 50s and 60s, during the time of oil nationalization and the CIA coup. Aida and I met up with an old professor of mine who is an expert in Persian poetry. We talked over what poetry could work for the context of the project and Akhavan Sales was interesting because his work belongs to a modernist school of Iranian poetry, where rhyming was not the first priority, whereas traditional poetry was made more deliberately to be put to song.

One of the poems is “Zemestan”, or Winter. This poem became popular in the aftermath of the 1953 coup, as it used winter as a metaphor for the shuttering of political freedom at the time. It has lyrics like, “people are all huddled in the cold and it's freezing, and if you see a friend and offer to shake his hand, he reluctantly takes his hand out of his coat and begrudgingly shakes your hand.”

The other one is “Katibeh”, or Inscription. It follows this group of people who are shackled together in this very abstract desert of despair. Drawn by a spectral voice that can’t be distinguished from reality or nightmare, they turn their attention to this giant rock on a hill and feel cosmically drawn to it. Their only hope is for somebody to finally go up to it and check it out, the rock is so curious. There's an inscription on the rock that says, “If you turn me over, I will tell you my secrets”-- overturn this earth to find enlightenment. One guy struggles heroically to move the rock over and flip it over to read the other side. When he does, he becomes silent, dumbstruck, capable only of staring off into the distance. Eventually people are like, “What does it say?” And he says, “It says the same thing on the other side.” I read it as a treatise on the absurdity of the promise and search for enlightenment, but I'm just a layman.

Youa: Are you okay with interpreting it differently than what it should be?

Biaban: I signed myself up for that I guess. There's a lot of text throughout the album. There's that newsreel, there are those poems. Aida does another song with some original vocals she improvised a while ago, and then there are some spoken word text-to-speech portions. There's a lot of text throughout, but I don't think it feels over-determined by that text. I think interpretation and even misinterpretation is a big part of it for me, putting it out there and out of my hand. I've heard artists say there are projects that they're working towards, they're reaching towards something, and then there are other projects where they're carrying something they need to let go. I think I'm trying to take all these emotions and ideas, these archival elements, and putting them out there how they've been filtered through myself and the machine.

Youa: When you're working with others, are you allowing them to collaborate or is it more directing them what to do?

Biaban: It was tough because of the time constraints. The one track that Aida wrote her own vocals for was something we were going to be working on before I actually got this commission. It was going to be for one of her projects, but it fell through with timing and the needs of her project. Once I got the commission and she was down to work on it, but she was very busy and traveling, so we weren’t really able to write our own lyrics. We did meet together and we talked about it and we landed on the same page about the general themes and a few poets, particularly Akhavan Sales. If it were a longer process, I feel like it would have been more working piece by piece together, but I’m still thrilled with the results.

Youa: Do you feel like you were able to achieve what you wanted to with this commission?

Biaban: Sonically, I'm very proud of it. I think I've explored and pushed myself in a lot of different directions at once, and I've managed to bring those sounds together cohesively. It pulls from familiar influences so you’ll recognize what you know, but at the same time, I don't think it's reducible to one thing or another, for what it’s worth.

Youa: Who do you think your audience is for this piece, and who do you want to reach

Biaban: People who share a similar attraction to dissonance, be it cultural, political, or anyone struggling with the surroundings they're born into one way or another. I don't have a specific audience in mind, but I hope to reach likeminded people, curious people, and people whose work challenges and inspires me.

It's nothing less than a huge privilege to be able to work with Aida on this. I'm very proud of our collaboration and it’s an experience that will stay with me forever. I'm very grateful 'cause Aida is so amazing at what she does. She's such a kind person and such a powerful voice. I'm very grateful to be able to work with her, and I'm very proud of the work that we're coming up with together.

Catch Biaban’s performance of Oil and Dust premiering live at The Cedar on Friday, February 17th as part of the Twelfth Annual Cedar Commissions. Buy tickets here.