BORSHCH

The ongoing collaboration between Iranian-Canadian brothers Mohammad and Mehdi of the project Saint Abdullah and Irish producer Ian McDonnell a.k.a. Eomac has been fruitful with releases on Planet Mu and Drowned By Locals and Other People. Putting together an eclectic collage, where samples from Shia Islam tradition can be found layered over hip-hop beats, tape hiss and noise of various origin, the trios genre-defying output repurposes personal histories, melting them together to imagine a sonic future. 

On the first night of 2024′ Berlin Atonal: OPENLESS, Saint Abdullah and Eomac will present a new work, created in collaboration with Italo-Australian video artist and filmmaker Rebecca Salvadori. A Forbidden Distance is an audio-visual piece commissioned by Berlin Atonal, Semibreve, Sónar and Unsound as part of ‘The Crossing’, a collaborative curatorial project supported by TIMES. The work explores a sense of self in relation to processes of displacement, reflecting on the nature of stories and fragmented experiences, both collectively and individually, and featuring Mohammad and Mehdi’s family archives filmed over the years by their mother.

Nastya Zamorska met with Mohammad Mehrabani of Saint Abdullah, Eomac and Rebecca Salvadori at their studio in Berlin, a few days before A Forbidden Distance premieres at OPENLESS. Ahead of their performance, they spoke about the work process behind their new piece, their shared experiences of displacement, sampling practices, and the light of hopefulness that found reflection in their collaboration.

Nastya Zamorska: The Saint Abdullah and Eomac collaboration has been going on for a few years now. Could you tell me how you initially got connected and started working together?

Eomac: We started to collaborate in 2019. I reached out to Moh because I had heard Saint Abdullah’s music and I really liked it. I was doing a mix series at the time for my label, Eotrax, and I just wanted them to do a mix for the series. I thought they’d put together something interesting, but then Moh was like, “Nope, we’re not going to do a mix for you, but let’s collaborate!” And so it started. I thought maybe we’d collaborate on a track or two, but it just developed into this ongoing project. Moh sent me so much material, even too much (laughs). And it took me about a year to actually respond. 

Mohammad Mehrabani: Yes, I tend to send a lot of files, which sometimes annoys people. But Ian was one of the guys who really put up with me. It all started here in Berlin, when I went to a friend’s house to listen to records and he put this one record on—Bedouin Trax—where Eomac was asked to sample Middle Eastern stuff and put his twist on it [released on Bedouin Records in 2016]. And I was like, what the fuck? Where is this kid from? I had no idea he was from Ireland. He did such a great job, it really blew me away. So when he reached out, it was an honor. The thing with mixes is that it just takes so much time. And I’m also not a DJ. I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings back then, Ian.

NZ: Rebecca, you have a long standing history of collaborating with musicians and institutions, having previously worked with Coby Sey, Andy Stott and Kenichi Iwasa and Tresor for their anniversary exhibition. At what stage did you get involved with Saint Abdullah and Eomac? How did the three of you get in touch and this new audio-visual concept come to be?

Rebecca Salvadori: One day, we just received a call from Atonal about working together. We had never been in touch before that, and this is the first time I’m working with someone where it didn’t, let’s say, organically happen.

I collaborate quite a lot, but I have a very specific way of working; it really needs to feel right. I also believe it’s important not to stay in your comfort zone too much, so I allowed myself to try a new direction and a new connection. And I’m very, very happy I did because we connected so well, and our practices have so much common ground. Throughout the entire project, we had a very honest, open, non-ego-driven work process, which was very refreshing and needed for me.

I believe it’s important not to stay in your comfort zone too much, so I allowed myself to try a new direction and a new connection. And I’m very, very happy I did because we connected so well, and our practices have so much common ground.

MM: After watching Rebecca’s films, the first question I asked her was, how do you put musicians at so much ease? She worked with so many folks that I absolutely love, and her ability to put people at ease really stood out. We were going to go through this really intense process together in a very quick time, and that was very special. Also Rebecca has got a lot of experience working with archives, finding a balance between creating something new and looking into the past to create newness. I think that’s where we really connected to her practice.

NZ: You say it was a quick time. How long did you work on this piece together?

MM: Not long at all, about six weeks. 

RS: Yes, we first got all together in July. That’s why the process was really such a jump.

NZ: A Forbidden Distance is described as a work about displacement. How did you connect over this topic, given that you all come from very different backgrounds and experiences?

MM: I think our connection is in being present in the moment, the broader moment, in the political and social environments, and letting that breathe through the sound. It’s a very cathartic exercise of using sound as a mechanism for recovering, and dealing with all this stuff. And hope too. Hope is a big part of what connects us.

RS: Yes, we are all coming from different angles, and this work is really about the three of us, and whatever baggage we are bringing. This connection opens points of intimacy and hope; a poetic journey into different emotions that have to do with displacement, its roots and the fragmentation of the displacement experience. We share this idea of seeking vitality within our work.

NZ: Displacement is an interesting word: one can be physically displaced, but mentally still very much present in the place they are displaced from, perhaps even more present in their longing than ever. Then there is the experience of mental displacement, when you just don’t quite feel right being where you are, like you don’t belong anywhere. How do you experience displacement? Do you relate to this?

RS: Yes, our work together started with the sense of belonging. I’m half Australian, half Italian. I never felt Australian, and I never felt fully Italian, and I don’t feel English either. So for me this is also a reflection concerning a sense of belonging, displacement of the roots. It’s also interesting that we all come from a very transient background, full of history, it’s a big part of our work.

MM: So much of this theme of displacement migration was so central to our entire existence (and Ian can speak more on the Irish experience). Now we are using these art forms to heal and make sense of your own history and your family’s history, and the state of the world. 

Eomac: Historically, we, the Irish, are very displaced people. It’s not so visceral in our current experience, but we have the legacy of displacement in our DNA. The Irish people, kind of like Iranian people, are all over the world. You find us everywhere because of the mass forced emigration in the 19th century. It’s not a direct experience of displacement nowadays but it’s somewhere there in the back of our minds, and you can feel the legacy that it has in our psyche. There is a sense of shame and insecurity from what happened in the past.

MM: The Iranian context is also very complicated. We grew up in a religious family that was still reeling from a revolution. After the war happened, there was this really fascinating mix between religion and revolution, which became a big part of our upbringing. Now, the trouble is that in the Iranian context, they don’t talk about this stuff. I don’t want to generalize, but a lot of what’s coming out in the Iranian context often comes from upper-middle-class to upper-class guys who are rejecting or downplaying the influence of religion and war. Why are we rejecting our past? This just doesn’t provide an answer to our identity.

Some of the samples we explore are from our own religious upbringing that still exists today within the Shia Islamic context. We are putting music from Shia mourning ceremonies over a hip-hop beat, and I love that we can be light about it.

Eomac: The nature of fragmentation in itself is weirdly unifying. We live in a culture now where everyone feels a little bit displaced and fragmented. We are all a bit disconnected and things are very, very divisive; I think everyone can relate to this in some way. We want to try and bring togetherness and hope to the conversation. It’s too easy to be numb.

NZ: Do you feel hopeful?

Eomac: Yeah, I think we have to stay hopeful. There has to be a vision for a point beyond all the sadness and all the horror and all the atrocities that are happening. We have to believe in that, or else, what the fuck are we doing?

MM: Absolutely. Hope and lightness go together. There is no point in making activist music that gets you to a place that is hopeless. There’s no point. As long as we’re here, we have hope.

NZ: That’s refreshing to hear because, many people don’t feel very hopeful these days.

MM: For this piece we worked with this artist Abbas Zahedi, who’s going to be in the film. And one night we were together, he reminded us of a study where they found that if a doctor is more hopeful in speaking to you, the likelihood of you surviving whatever ailment that you’re struggling with is higher. Purely by virtue and optimism or sense of emotional intelligence, and that’s just crazy. Hope is vital.

NZ: Could you tell me about the role of the personal archive in the concept of A Forbidden Distance?

MM: We now joke in our family that we always were looking for Rebecca. My mother would film everything when we were young, all the way through university. She’d always have a camera in her hands. She became a mother of four during the war. She didn’t become a journalist, which was what she always wanted, but she was the journalist in our family and filmed everything. So it was a massive archive. This archive became a starting point for Rebecca to work with.

RS: We went through the archive with this idea of the process and our connection being central in the work. So the process becomes the work in a way. Then I was curious about how the samples came together: the meaning of the sample, who were the people in the samples, what they meant and why. From that came the idea of inviting Raheel Khan and Abbas Zahedi who are featured on the tracks to my house and filming them having conversations.

Eomac: It’s almost like we were documenting the different fragments that go into making the piece itself as well as the fragmentation of the topic we’re dealing with. We wanted to document the different parts, the fragments of the actual piece itself and the process of making it.

NZ: Sampling is such an integral part of your practice. How does the process of finding samples and working with them look for you?

MM:  I almost don’t even see myself as a producer. Obviously, Ian and I, we are both producers, but the skill set that Ian has is fucking unbelievable. The stuff he does in digital software and, obviously, his ear and his compositional understanding are just unbelievable. My study is more about looking out into the world and finding these things that can then come together in ways that maybe you wouldn’t expect. 

Eomac: Often in ways you really wouldn’t expect! Moh sent this email with context and background to some of the samples for one of the tracks we’ve been working on, which has this sexy, almost hip-hop beat. It has a hip-grinding feel to it, with something like a bassline from a jungle track. I thought maybe he sampled that, but no—he sampled this Iranian pop tune that sounds nothing like the track we were actually working on. It’s much more pitched up and cheesy, and I was blown away when I heard it and how Moh saw the potential to create this sexy hip-hop music from something like that. It’s incredible.

MM: I’m not working with software much. I use Ableton to edit but typically the stuff I end up sending Ian is in one take. I’ll spend hours trying to do one take of something and chance has a lot to do with it.

Eomac: Yes, he often sends me hours of recordings. We sample in very different ways: Moh will sample everything that’s out there in the world and then he’ll give it to me and I’ll just sample it in a much more micro fashion, taking little bits to build beats. So all the memorable samples you hear in our music are Moh something, and then the little details and layers around it is usually what I do.

MM: Also Rebecca and I sample in similar ways.

RS: Yes, totally. I work with sound a lot as well. I’m always re-editing music, chopping it up, taking bits from other parts, and layering them together. It’s because the music builds the film, then the film builds the music, and you keep changing both. It’s constantly being rebuilt. It’s very physical, I guess. It’s a very similar process.

NZ: It’s fascinating how through sampling sounds from different cultural contexts you can create something completely new. It’s beautiful. 

Eomac: That’s the interesting thing about samples. It’s all about recontextualizing things in different ways, and there are endlessly infinite possibilities. It is a beautiful thing, for sure.

NZ: What else can we expect from A Forbidden Distance sonically?

Eomac: It’s a huge range of sounds: from flute music for children to really noisy abrasive things to slow hip-hop. Most of it feels like a continuation of what we’ve already done. There are elements of the previous albums there, just in a different context and, sort of, progressed further.

MM: I think we have a way of working which keeps things fairly coherent sonically, but within that we just go wherever we feel like; wherever the samples take us. The samples suggest a certain way of moving. It’s kind of open but I do think there’s a coherent thread of sound through it all. it’s not like we’re formulaically trying to have a certain range of music. We’re just curious kids, you know.