Ash Koosha: International Showcase Fund (ADE 2016)
To say Ash Koosha is an Iranian-born, London-based electronic musician is barely to scratch the surface of what this remarkable man is all about. A synaesthete who sees colours as sound, a virtual reality pioneer, a software humanist, a political cause celebre, a former rock musician and student of classical music, there are as many facets to him as there is texture in his fractal, complex, remarkable music.
Born Ashkan Kooshanejad, Ash split his early years between Tehran and Frankfurt, where his father worked in the printing industry. The Iran of his early years was, he says, in a “destructive” phase, where music in particular was hard to come by, but his parents made the most of their time in Germany to stock up with cassettes of everything from early Genesis to Japanese classical music. Moving back to Iran in the 90s, he secretly watched MTV by night and bought smuggled cassettes and copies of Rolling Stone on the black market.
From 2010 onward — making a living providing soundtracks to Iranian films, commissioned and delivered over the internet—Koosha threw himself into his own experiments in electronic sound. Living in London, he went into musical hiding, often vanishing for two or three weeks at a time while he wrestled with a variety of problems in sound. He perhaps retreated even further into himself and his own music after the terrible events of November 2013, when three members of the Tehran band Yellow Dogs — who had also been featured in No one Knows About Persian Cats — were shot dead in Brooklyn by another Iranian exile.
The “nano-compositions” he created in this period were based on “the sonic behaviour of fractal patterns that exist within a stretched or rescaled sound wave but without pitch alteration.” More importantly, they sounded amazing and when he began to put them on soundcloud and an obscure Japanese blog, they were championed by Antony Fantano of The Needle Drop, leading to a deal with NY DIY label Olde English Spelling Bee. The resulting album, Guud, didn’t even have a press release but went on to be included in FACT’s Albums of the Year, with Koosha also being interviewed by Pitchfork and featured by the Guardian.
Now, with I AKA I, Koosha has taken his musical experiments a step further still. Fascinated for many years by his own synaesthesia (the ability to ‘see’ sound), Koosha has tried to systematise this ability by treating sound “like a physical matter which can be broken down, liquified, rescaled or spatially positioned.” The results are nothing less than stunning. The album, he says “is about transformations in psychology and technological advancements – the result is always the same humans in the end.”
In addition, filming is complete on his first feature film, Fermata, which features Colin Firth’s son, Will Firth, as well Ash’s old friend from Take It Easy Holiday, Negar Shaghaghi, who also co-wrote, plus she’s the artist behind the incredible “I AKA I” artwork. Keeping things in the family, the film was shot by his brother. Beyond this, Koosha’s interests remain varied. He heads up the software company KOIZ and is creating possibly the world’s first virtual reality album. I AKA I will be shown in 2016 using Oculus Rift headsets ahead of their projected mass marketing. The suspicion remains that he has barely got started…