Aria Rostami - Allegory (2023)

Iranian-American composer and ambient musician Aria Rostami joins Phantom Limb’s flourishing Spirituals imprint for new album Allegory, a collection of longing and gently gritty meditations for tape loops, piano and recontextualized old recordings, responding to sobriety, chaos and environmental disaster.

“I often think of forces of nature when I think of collaboration, improvisation or heavy processing; surrendering to choices that are either not my own, impossible to plan or creating something where the finished material could not have been imagined from square one.” Rostami tells us. “I'm not entirely sure if this is true, I can't find anything that backs this up, but an old co-worker once told me that the original definition of the word 'horror' was 'a beauty of nature so profound that it is overwhelming' - true or not, it makes a lot of sense to me - that sometimes beauty can be terrifying or that nature doesn't need to be serene to be inspiring or humbling."

Merging haunting shadowplay with tingling melancholia, Aria Rostami’s sense for texture is uniquely subtle, rendering nuanced piano and drone into immersive, glacial elegies rarefied with static air. Throughout Allegory, Rostami’s palette colours with stillness and beatific stasis, creating an effusive, dreamy impressionism. Shapes float and flicker about a pastel fog, teasing colour and detail before vanishing into mist. Inspired by American composer John Luther Adams, Rostami reflects the natural world in his sublime, organic repetition of melodic phrases, and heartache in the yearning elegance of Allegory’s organic ambient washes.