The sun, a skull, and a vast expanse of desert. The imagery that makes up the woven artwork for Farshad Akbari’s Echoes of Nothingness provides an intriguing signpost for the headspace that this music was created in and where it leads its listeners. Whilst the sand-filled skull might be a signifier, this isn’t the desert psychedelia of El Topo, or the paranoid insanity of Gerry. Nor is it the peculiar sprawl of Walkabout and Picnic at Hanging Rock. It arises, instead, from Akbari’s homeland of Iran, the same landscape depicted by the filmmakers Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Mohammad Rasoulof.
All of which is to say that the arid dunes adorning the album’s cover provide a physical context for a stratified journey through the geography of Akbari’s psyche. A journey of emotional clout, complicated thought, and vast imagination. Where digitised wind whistles through heartbreaking tones and the unravelling vistas play tricks upon the mind.
It starts off mysteriously enough, with slow, pensive keys climbing up the pitch ladder on ‘Shine’, gradually morphing, via ‘Ablaze’s buzzing notes and the “whirp” of a jerked delay control, into the fully frazzled and acid squelched kaleidoscopic funfair of ‘Manifestation’. Rhythms pitter patter in the background as warbling arpeggiators rotate. It’s reminiscent of the power failing on a battery-operated merry-go-round comprised of fire engines, police cars, and ambulances – basically anything with an erratic siren capable of looping in a nauseating manner.
Akbari then shifts from churning guts into ‘Cycle’s pounding dance floor. There’s a wild side which threatens to spring free through the squealing bleeps darting and dashing around like fireflies with hungry nostrils, juxtaposing the slow, convoluted keyboard melody worming its way through the chaos. All the disparate parts appear to be off on their own course, taking care of their own agendas, only deigning to line up together on occasion.
From here on out we’re in a more subdued, thoughtful space. The careening turmoil vanishes into the past, allowing space for reflection, for ‘Vestibule’s moody pulses and creeping bass, and for the soft, sad horn of ‘White Thorn’ and its gently plinked keys cautiously conversing with one another.
‘Wilderness’ is where the journey reaches its emotional climax, however. The fireworks of those earlier tub-thumpers receding further still as a singular melancholy theme rings out, calling to a loved one who is lost or missing. Its rising timbre instilling hope… but only for so long. It’s as if someone has rerecorded Kali Malone’s Sacrificial Code on a portable synth amidst the smoking wreckage of lovelorn ruins.
At 67 minutes long, this is no quick fix. It requests time to sit with the coiling electronics, to let it seep in and take you away. Maybe you’ll envision yourself striding across the glowing sand beneath the sun’s scorching rays, the past and the future no more than a breeze sliding over a cranial bone poking through the grains. Maybe not. Maybe it’s all just Echoes of Nothingness.
