Thea Farhadian sent us a copy of her Tattoos and Other Markings (OTHER MINDS OM 1039-2) from Oakland in CA. It’s an impressive and deep piece of work, very texturally rich, and packed with research and personal resonances for this gifted player.
We’ve heard her before a few times, but mostly (it seems to me) doing solo violin works, or in collaborative settings, and largely focussed on her improvising skills – although she wasn’t averse to treating the sound of her instrument with electronic effects. Today’s item showcases her skills as an electro-acoustic composer, a talent which I was wholly unaware of. It seems to have started out as a far back as 2005, when at Mills College she first attempted experiments with electronic music; now some 20 years later, she delivers her first composition in that medium. I think it comprises field recordings, samples, and pure electronic music – hopefully some of her violin work too – all assembled with the composerly skills and training she learned during her “classical violin” phase, a time in the 1980s and 1990s when she played in the Berkeley Symphony. There also seems to have been a graphic score involved too, if page 7 of the booklet speaks true. Well, maybe not purely graphical – words and numbers appear in boxes, some printed in red – but it’s quite opaque to me and I admire anyone who can use this very modern form of shorthand as a viable alternative to writing musical notes on staves.
Also layered into the work is Farhadian’s personal history and memories associated with Armenian culture. The music of Armenia has been played in her family home since earliest youth, mostly folk music, but she herself was drawn to the religious music (which later led her to study Arabic classical music). For this Tattoos project, Thea Farhadian conducted historical research on the Armenian genocide of 1915-1917; a black spot on history if ever there was, with the mass murder of about a million Armenians, death marches to the Syrian Desert, plus massive cultural displacement, forced Islamization, recruitment into harems, even slavery. Women and children suffered the heaviest. Tattooing was part of it; on the front cover you can see a real-life portrait of one such tattooed individual, just one from a collection of such albums now preserved at the Armenian Genocide Museum in Yerevan. As Thea delved further into the story, she learned that her own family had been affected and she got a verbal account from a relative of what it was like to receive such a tattoo. “It almost felt like a number”, is the takeaway, reminding us of how tattoos were also used to identify and enumerate all the displaced peoples during the Holocaust.
This moving history is but one of the layers that has fed into Tattoos and Other Markings, but its emotional reach is wide. Samples of Armenian speech are included in the electro-acoustic work, most poignantly on the 18:21 mins centrepiece work ‘Eulogy’, where the surface-distressed voice tapes surface in among the unsettling rise-and-fall electronic tones. Other field recordings have also been embedded into the whole piece, collected over many years during her travels and her performances, drawn from locations as diverse as Egypt, Yerevan, and Armenia. It shows the considerable amount of effort and patience that has been poured into this work; it’s more like a curated scrapbook of audio information, and the cumulative affect on the listener is accordingly quite considerable. Joseph Bohigian, another electronic composer likewise concerned with exploring the culture of memory and diaspora connected to his Armenian heritage, wrote the very detailed and sympathetic notes for the booklet; he finds nuances of meaning in just about every element of this careful work, and has articulated them very clearly in his text.
Even without the specific historical references it makes, Tattoos and Other Markings amounts to a very honest, emotional, and perceptive statement about our shared humanity, and on that account it deserves everyone’s attention. (19/02/2025)