Amir Amiri is a genre fluid santur player and composer with a well honed knack for bringing his ancient instrument, and Persian culture with it, into all sorts of diverse musical, geographical and cultural settings. Christophe Lamarche-Ledoux is a multi-instrumentalist and equally stylistically restless musician and composer with a nice line in film scores.
A collaboration between the two was never going to be formulaic, in fact it's turned out to be a quite magical and particular fitting soundtrack for a film entitled Universal Language, "An absurdist triptych of seemingly unconnected stories finds a mysterious point of intersection in this tale set somewhere between Winnipeg and Tehran."
As you would imagine the music is a meeting of worlds too. Amiri's santur will be the attention grabber for the Western listeners, its evocative sounds giving the compositions that exotic feel, but dig a bit deeper and there's a lot going on. Aside from the santur, and as with so many soundtracks, there is a classical thread to the album albeit an Anglo-Arabic this time, but there are devils in the detail. This really is a swirling fusion of man, machine, worlds and wires, and although I haven't seen the film yet I'm sure it works a treat with the distinctive cinematography.
Special attention should also be paid to a couple of tracks, which I feel stand up on their own without any visual context. Check out "The Fields of Iale" which is an elegant slice of quasi new age music with some particularly cosmic synths that sooth and seduce in equal measure, then head over to "Funeral for a Cat" which has a star gazing kosmische vibe.
Playlist Companion.
Find "Fields of Iale" in the New Age of New Age Playlist for the sake of argument.
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