Ava Rasti
Biography Ava Rasti
Ava Rasti
is a young Iranian musician, based in Tehran, who is continually shaping her sound. Having picked up piano and guitar to front the post-punk group, The Finches, while still in her teens, for the last few years Rasti has worked solo. Over a series of self-released albums she’s explored the areas of ambient and modern classical, working electronically with bass-guitar generated drones.
Rasti’s latest long-player was conceived while attending Fabrica, an artistic residency held in Treviso, in Northern Italy. The key source of inspiration was the nearby Piave River, a scenic spot where Rasti and her friends would play and chill. The Piave, however, was the site of bloody battles in both the Napoleonic and First World Wars, and it was this hidden heritage that sparked the concept behind the LP. At its heart is the idea that any location is a dense layered lattice of events and memories. That such places can mean very different things to different people. The compositions also aim to question how reliable we are as narrators, our personal histories blurring fact with fantasy, and how each retelling will alter a story’s “truth”. Into this Rasti also mixed personal shaky, uncertain recollections of her father. Interviewed for the press release, Rasti paraphrased the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus:
“We never step in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and we are not the same human being.”
Musically, Rasti illustrates these ideas by taking tiny fragments from famous classical pieces, and replaying them over and over, until melodically they’re far removed from their root. Mirroring recalling distant, faded almost forgottens. The seven electro-acoustic pieces travel from symphonic Eno-esque drones and treated orchestral textures, through powerful tides of machine pulses and storms of improvised percussion. The bowing, scraping and scratching of strings sometimes collaged with Fennesz-like fizz. Along the way, pinpoints of piano, like welcoming lights, provide warmth and reassurance, on a journey that attempts to face and make peace with the past.
