Azam Ali's Synesthesia: The Echoes Review
We have followed Azam Ali for three decades. Her sensual voice, spinning minarets of melody, seduced us when we first hear her back in 1996 singing on an Angels of Venice album. But it was with Vas, her Persian fusion group with percussionist Greg Ellis, that really turned our heads, as she sang in her own imaginary glossolalia. It sounded like a real language, but it was only a language of Azam’s creation. She followed that up with the Persian fusion group, Niyaz, with her husband, multi-string player Loga Ramin Torkian. She’s released several solo albums, singing in many different languages and then in 2019, she went electronic and sang in English on the album, Phantoms. That was an Echoes CD of the Month that year. Now she’s returned with something of a follow-up called Synesthesia. That’s the condition where your senses cross and you might hear color as a sound or numbers might conjure taste or smell, or any of the other five senses in a mixed-up matrix.
The title track is almost a haiku, poetically describing certain synesthesia effects. But the song is less a mixing of senses and more of a hallucinogenic excursion into a dark nightmare. Azam’s voice sounds anguished as she sings lines like:
Gulfs of shadows
Whiteness of vapors
Alchemy prints
Silences crossed with angels
It’s all sung over a crushing electronic beat and swirling razors of sound. It’s a gateway into an album that continues into a darkly catacombic realm.
Much of the album is inspired by the Covid19 lockdown and many of the songs were written during that period. “Nothing But Time” is one of the true pandemic songs on the album, a lament on those lazy, lockdown times that were more oppressive than restful in those empty days where time stood still.
We filled our lives with so many things
None of which gave us wings
Now we sit amongst our treasures
And long for friends & the sounds of laughter
All of Azam’s songs are wrapped in the most delirious and inventive electronic arrangements, drawing from EDM and trance rhythms, but with an edge of Persian groove in her electronic percussion arrangements. You can hear that Persian influence in her voice as well with the way she bends note in melismatic phrases.
Her song, “To Pieces” is a tormented hymn that calls to mind the words of Melisandre, the Red Witch of Game of Thrones, who portended desperate times. And in fact, it’s largely inspired by the fires of Los Angeles in the past year. As she sings of “fire in your eyes,” a thudding death march of low percussion charges into the breach, ending with the refrain: “There are violins playing that sound like human cries.”
There are more affirmative songs on Synesthesia, like “Hazy Gray,” a title that sounds like it could be a Cocteau Twins song. Over a relatively perky groove with a syncopated electronic percussion line, she sings of love and holding together against the world. “Autumn and Goodbye” is one of those songs that stands somewhere between a love song and a devotional hymn. That’s something Azam picked up from Hildegard von Bingen and Rumi. Her vocal arrangement is entrancing, with her voice layered in a chanting chorus while her son, Iman, lays-in some mournful cello.
Two songs that don’t sound like they’re from someone at the edge of despair are “Green & Gold” and “In Valleys Green.” These are hymns to nature with layered vocal arrangements and long, melismatic melodies that might have you thinking of Enya.
There are two cover tunes on the album. On Phantoms, she covered a song by the Cocteau Twins and she does it again on Synesthesia , covering their cover of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren.” That appeared on the 1984 recording It’ll End in Tears by the 4AD collective, This Mortal Coil. Azam replaces Robin Gurthrie’s plaintive, reverbed guitar with a gothic space organ and sub-bass drone. The other cover is Natalie Merchant’s political anthem, “This House is on Fire.” Over a percolating synth rhythm, Azam sounds like an avenging angel laying down the law. Interestingly, this is the only song with an overtly middle eastern sound, but that actually comes from Merchant’s original arrangement, which Azam replicates.
The album ends with “Witness.” After all the tumultuous songs, it ends the album in calm, sounding like a hymn to the universe as Azam gives in to the feeling that we are all just watchers, following as the world unfolds.
Even more than on her album Phantoms, Azam traverses a dark midnight of sound on Synesthesia. It’s her most personal album to date. While her songs for Vas and Niyaz, sung in wordless vocals or Farsi, conjured up an emotional world in their own right, singing in English, as she does on Synesthesia , brings those emotions home in a more concrete way. And yet, it is just as beautiful and seductive, because with Azam Ali, you don’t really need words. It’s all in her alluring voice.
Hear our interview with Azam Ali in the Echoes Podcast.
Read our review of her previous CD of the Month: Phantoms
Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club