Ash Koosha- I Aka I (2016)

Ash Koosha- I Aka I (2016)

By: Ghost Writer

Ashkan Kooshanejad, must be a really expressive man, dividing his time between film making, acting and making out of this world music, Ashkan, an Iranian native who lives exiled in London, after one of his filmmaking efforts got him in trouble with the government.

Known in the musical world as Ash Koosha, his music is definitely some of the most outrageous and amazing sounds to come out this year, his recording, titled I Aka I, deserves one's chance to give it a listen in order to get immersed in the dark world of Ash, Ote, the record first track is a big blow to the head, eerie as most of the works of Venezuelan producer Arca, but capable of conjure brutally expansive beats, going really near industrial music territory, and at the same time taking inspiration from the London dubstep scene.

You can say that Feather, the next track is mire melodic, it has strong vibrant keyboard motifs that start to dissolve and suddenly go for a dark ride thru the shadows, Koosha manages to get those schizophrenic intense sounds from genres like dubstep or juke inside his compositions, there's some despair into them that connects both to the shadowy dubstep of Burial and to the existential wondering of famed Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, but Koosha likes to keep things moving, he is not too static, and for the next song, titled Eluded he goes into some scary melodies with twisted synth lines, that in the center, keep some Iran´s traditional music inspired parts.

There are great compositions all along the record, like in In Line, a chaotic and dissonant piece with Koosha introducing Iran´s native sounds into the already disturbing mix, going even deeper into that direction in the beautifully resonant and short Mudafossil, or going into really strange worlds like in Hex or Ooh Uhh, pieces with its own logic and beauty, and speaking of beauty, there's Biutiful, a really moving nostalgic piece that wouldn't be so out of place on a David Lynch movie, or record.

Pieces like Fool Moon play with our minds in capricious ways, while heavy hitters like Make It Fast or Shah, full of dynamic moves and unsuspected motifs, especially on Shah, the listener is again exposed in a way to Koosha's Iran´s music tradition, building a powerful bridge between East and West, between technology and tradition, between new worlds and ancient ones, and that's one of the truly special qualities of I Aka I, the possibility, at least on a sound dimension, to live in a world between those two colliding worlds.