Seare Ahmad Farhat

رو به رو به رادیو

[face to face with the radio]

live electronics and installation

The work uses two custom “loudspeaker” masks, a radio, and a microphone. The sonic material of the work is a mixture of fixed ambisonic music, played through the two loudspeaker masks, feedback as managed through the microphone, static as played through the radio, and live electronic synthesis of the sounds (performed live in the recording by myself).
The fixed media is built through a collage of a single short samples (played fully in the recording) of each song. All sound is derived from two songs by Algerian Jewish Pop Star, Enrico Mecias, and Afghan Pop Star, Ahmad Zahir: Enfants des Tous Pays and Ay Gulazar-e Man, respectively.
I hope to invoke the participatory act of listening, especially radio listening, through the depiction of two static masks performing the role of “music makers.” One could perhaps read my anecdote of my mother and aunt into these masks, though I explicitly problematize this reading through the role of the masks in the performance. The performance here is inverse – where the anthropomorphized figures (the masks) are creating ambisonic music and the musical technologies (radio and microphone) sit, almost passively, listening rather than producing. I hope to draw attention to the problems of defining agencial figures in “modernization,” especially in a cultural sense, within Kabul’s 1970’s landscape. I ask the questions: who is modernizing? [is it the already wealthy cultural elite – i.e. Ahmad Zahir, who’s eye is towards European modernisms]. What values are being emphasized, and who is left behind? These masks, resembling chadari figures, are instead the empowered figures of this performance.