Everything in this world is connected by one thing. Heartbeats. From these dulcet heartbeats emerges life. From these autonomous lives emerges stories and from these stories comes allegory. It is through decrypting the allegory of heartbeats that we trip on the eminent simplicity of complexity in life and things. As music zealots with heartbeats of our own we accumulate hours against the clock with our ears attuned to sonorous landscapes trying to decipher the allegories of the clicks and cuts whilst we try to meld these allegories with our own. The result is a nexus between the spasmodic allegories of music and listener. However, as is the manner of the simplicity of complexity, a third force enters the maxim. The creator. Aril Brikha.
Taking a small step onto a crowded dancefloor with Aril Brikha at the helm, partially hidden behind a clandestine set-up of musical equipment, the rhythm of your heartbeat mutates. First it swerves towards the ethereal soundscapes. Second it swerves towards the people around sharing the experience. Thirdly it swerves towards the affable Aril Brikha – the essentia behind the neoteric soundscapes – whose dark eyes are as warm, tantalizing and telling as the oscillating synthetics aplay in the music. Lastly it converges all these anomalous allegories, turning them inside out to create one sole heartbeat, one sole experience from the listener’s perspective. This is the simplicity of complexity.
The Iran-born, Swedish-bred Aril Brikha questioningly raises the issue of simplicity and complexity when trying to define his own allegory, “A simple man from a simple family making simple music with complicated results?” Experiencing an Aril Brikha live performance or drowning in the ethereal sounds of ‘Deeparture in Time’ will allow any listener to feel a connection to these words. Simple music with a complicated result. For stepping into the sounds of Aril Brikha is like stepping into the rip-laden waters of the ocean. The surface calm and self-possessed, but the undertow abound with unsung deflection. It is, perhaps, this penetrating double-edged simplicity and the uncalculated approach to creating soundwaves that makes the music of Aril Brikha sear with freshness. “My vision or direction hasn’t changed because I have never felt I need to have one when making music,” he says. “I let the music control me and take me to wherever it wants to. I see myself as just a tool, similar to my equipment that will not make a sound until you put some human touch or feelings into it. I never start with an idea for a track. Things just progress and I go with the flow.” The only thing that has changed, he says, is “I got older, the sound got older and I have experienced how something private such as the music I made and make in my bedroom affects people on a dancefloor.”
The private and public allegories of music, like Aril’s, have been continuous throughout history – stirring and inspiring. A music zealot himself, Aril delved into his own musical antecedents, taking from their allegories a cluster of beatitude and awakening inspiration. “Depeche Mode inspired me to get a computer to start sequencing instead of just playing the keyboard,” he reflects. “This was when I was around thirteen. When I was around fifteen I started to hang out at raves and never really got into it, but along with my background of Depeche, cheesy 80s, EBM and the sounds of Basic Channel and Robert Hood’s internal empire – this is what finally shaped whatever the style is that you would call my music.” It was always the worlds outside of his own, musically and culturally, that Aril sought with fervor. Having emigrated to Sweden at a young age, it was never a place where he felt one hundred percent commodious and it was never a place that fully enabled him to nurture and cultivate his creative energies and ability to create music that placed a tenacious hold on the senses of listeners. “I left Iran when I was 3 years old so I don’t remember too much of it. My family moved to Sweden and we ended up in a small city where I stayed until I was 18. It was okay growing up there – safe, clean and boring. People will, in the best case, tell it to your face what they think of you as an immigrant, but usually you get the Swedish silent treatment,” he says of Jonkoping where he grew up. “So by 18 I moved to Stockholm when I finished school and after 4 years I moved my family to Stockholm too so I didn’t have to go visit them in that small hell-hole of a town. Right now I do feel like I did when I was 18 and sick of that place. I’m quite sick of Stockholm and its non-existent social life. People work 9-5, get a boyfriend or girlfriend and hang out with them and maybe go out on the weekends. I do prefer the Spanish way of life. They work longer than 5 everyday, but they still go out with friends and have a glass of wine and some food. So yeah, I might be living in the wrong city.”
It was outside of the borders of the Scandinavian country that Aril also found his soundsccapes and allegories received warmly from the impetuous beating hearts at the corners of the globe. Shying away from the loop-based techno arising in Sweden, Aril unconsciously fell into the deep and emotive world of techno flourishing from the industrial city of Detroit. A city that he now has a great affinity with, partially due to his first release ‘Groove La Chord’ being signed to May’s Transmat and partially due to his sound capturing the very essence of Detroit techno. “I was and still am, so far, from Detroit geographically and at least then mentally. Especially after I’ve seen the place, met the people and experienced the warmth of being embraced in a place so far from home and making it a place that I can call my second home, at least for my music,” he says of his involvement in the Detroit community. “I feel proud in a strange way when associated with the sound or community, but at the same time I have never been part of it except for releasing my music on a Detroit based label. I guess I bring my ever more mixed background to the already melting pot that is called Detroit techno.”
Delineating Aril’s music into a string of words or categories is simultaneously evident and burdensome. Yes his debut album ‘Deeparture in Time’ comfortably resonates a Detroitesque aesthetic, but it also extends beyond classification and remains a masterpiece with or without association. Despite having created each track individually without an album concept in sight, each and every track on the album has a deep-seated and subconscious connection of striking elements and contradictions. Dark yet light moods, simple yet complex rhythms, sparse yet rich textures, grinding yet delicate sounds, sometimes serious yet sometimes playful – the simplicity of complexity. “My aim is to produce separate tracks. I never produce in terms of an album. I just made tracks that then got collected into an album. I guess the next one will be the same since it’s been 4 years since the last,” he says of his lucratively pending follow-up album. While his approach remains the same for the next release the target at the end of the release has shifted. “There is always pressure for a follow up release, but ‘Deeparture in Time’ was only made for me alone to listen to. This time all of the tracks have been made with an actual release in mind, which is very different for me. There will not be a new album coming out on Transmat, but I hope there will be one out later this year on another label. I have been talking to some labels, but I still haven’t signed. I don’t want to make the mistake of ending up giving my name, my music and the rights to it if it is not well paid.”
Now, with the allegories of Aril Brikha and his music submerging into the publicly private heartbeats of listeners the world over, he is now faced with the perilous task of balancing his live harvest so that he can simultaneously make people move and listen to his neoteric world of sound. “It’s hard to balance. I want to do things my way, but at the same time you don’t want to bore the crowd with too many breaks, too many strings and too many deep tracks,” he says earnestly. “Every set is different depending on the venue, the people, the vibe and the mood. I don’t like compromising, but since you are invited AND getting paid to ‘entertain’ you do have a responsibility.” While we, the listeners, continue cycliclly to converge the anomalous allegories into one heartbeat on the dancefloor whilst listening to Aril Brikha’s world of sound, Brikha does the very same thing. “I have my whole live set built on separate tracks and parts and I don’t use any arrangements. This way I can choose the order of the tracks, how I play them, how long and most importantly having the ability to have the crowd control me and then me the music and then back again. Again there, I just make the tracks, put them into the live set and then I choose on the spot if I want to play them or not.”
Recently, having incorporated a laptop into his array of titan hardware, Aril has found that his scope has broadened and the cyclical and spontaneous nature of his sets has been propelled into new territory. “After the last tour playing in Japan with my laptop, being the first gig I was nervous, but after Japan, Korea, Singapore, Jakarta, Melbourne and Auckland I ended up coming home and since then I have not made a single track on my hardware. I’m very happy about this evolution as much as it scares me. The possibilities are endless, which is really scary because I still want to feel that I’m ‘pressured’ to make the most of what I have and with computers these days you can do almost everything and more.” The inexhaustible promises of the music industry continue to take new turns as we advance further into the high-tech gadget world of modernity. “I think all new things have their pro’s and con’s, but I think and hope that quality will win in the end. These days you only release music to able to DJ or perform, which I think is quite sad. This means that you need to release floorfillers that people want to see the DJ drop when they go to a gig,” he says of the burgeoning rise of amateur producers and new technology. “The spreading of MP3s is something nobody can stop, but I hope there will be ways of downloading and paying for the music. I think a lot of people would actually do that if it was easy and convenient and there are companies setting this up now apart from itunes. I just hope that at the end the artist will get paid not only the company, the label and everybody else ‘exploring’ the possibilities of streaming and downloading music.”
Leaving aside the advancements and twists and turns of the music industry Aril Brikha will still be here consuming and penetrating the simplicities of complexities through his music – armed with his own allegories, own heartbeat, own chocolate, own wine and own food – and taking his captivating essentia and omnipotent world of deep sound to us, the autonomous heartbeating music zealots, around the globe. Last week the destination was the land of the rising sun. This week the destination is the land downunder – where Aril will follow up on his virginal escapades of last year. “I had a great time least year and this is usually a good thing and a bad thing because you don’t know how to follow that up. I just hope that the people can get into it this time too,” Aril hopes. “It is, after all, a live set. Nothing is pre-recorded so I have to get into the vibe of the crowd and they in mine so we can interact. I hate playing without any feedback. Music should be fun, even though I like my music dark and deep. This time I’m staying a bit longer so I guess I will have more time to kill some of my pre-conceived images of Australia – bbq’s and beer. I hate beer, but I am definately always up for a barbie!”
The destination may change from week to week, but the blueprint will remain unwavering. The hearts will still be beating. The lives will still be emerging. The stories and allegories will still be formulating and we will still be here decrypting them and creating a nexus between music, heartbeats, allegories and Aril Brikha.
Don’t miss this nexus and one of the best live artists in our world of music perform at Honkytonks in Melbourne on Saturday 20th August 2005.
