Silence (Intro)

Book I - Genesis · Track 1 

When composing the intro track to the EP, I understood that this was the first piece of audio my fans would be hearing from me after stepping away from music for over a year. Publicly slandered, fed to the wolves and abandoned by collaborators, pulled in every direction by expectations of fans, community activists and leaders, and anxiety-inducing click-bait-politics... I needed to step away and figure out how I'd gotten here. I needed to turn the noise off completely - I hadn't heard myself think or felt myself feel in a long time... and because of that... I couldn't write music anymore either. Silence in itself is a powerful thing - it implies different things to different people. Silence to some means peace, to others it's space for introspection or.. maybe an absence of something, of grief...or it could suggest being complicit to grave injustice. There were several moments during my personal reading of the Book of Genesis (the first book of the Torah) where the presence of Silence illicit different reactions from me as well. The silence of a father when his child was abused... the silence between sentences, where more is told when something was not said.... and in the beginning... all there was was silence. Didn't that need to be in order for it to be filled? Silence was really healing for me, but in it, I was also able to feel all the fractures, the the breaks, the burns, the sounds of tragedy and trauma, embarrassment, hope, disappointment, resilience, liberation and more... so when composing the intro of GENESIS, I decided not to use my voice, but to compose something warm, inviting, safe... something that instantly soothes the nervous system.. but then purposely fracture it as it developed. Tense harmonies and unsettling glitches bring a discomfort that I felt needed to exist with the comforting sounds of the strings and vamping piano, 'cause isn't that what life always is? You cannot only have silence just like you cannot ever only have peace. There will always be noise and always be chaos - everything needs balance. But it's interesting what gets triggered in us when silence is introduced... and why? That's the beginning of exploration, and it's in silence that I uncovered stories of my Jewish ancestors and retold them in a language and sound palette familiar to me as an Iranian. It was in silence that I reconnected with human stories and the perpetually complex human experience. And it was because of silence, that I was able to rediscover, reclaim and recreate myself.

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