Where Sound Dissolves: A Conversation with Ashkan Layegh

What was the initial spark for the piece, and how did the concept of ‘ephemerality’ guide your process?

I think none of us can really deny the material truths of every single one of us: the fact that life eventually ends at a certain point, and the experience of owing a human body, and how this affects us. This is one thing we can all be certain exists. I’ve always been quite interested in exploring ideas of viscerality in my music, and see how much the physical material can make some sort of intimate relationship between the performers, my music, and also my audience. This has been always present in my work.

At the same time, I’ve been trying to acknowledge that this physicality eventually ends. My work can be put into certain blocks of time where we have very intense, consistent physical activities that’s happening, and then suddenly we cut and go to something else, and then we cut and get something else. But they recur. There is some sort of causality, as something moves from one thing to another to another, but also comes back in different juxtapositions. In that way the material is quite ephemeral: what you’re hearing now, you will definitely not hear 40 seconds later, but it will definitely recur.

How do cycles and self-reflexivity shape the piece?

A big part of why music is very much about cataloguing, how the systems of power try to catalogue our day-to-day life and to try to categorize it in ways that eventually fail – whether it’s gender, sexuality, race. This is something I’m deeply passionate about exploring, because today is this notion, tomorrow is another, and it always fails to encompass our collective existence.

I often like to explore these notions in my work as much as I can – not in a very explicit way, as in my text, but in the way the music works and sounds. The music gives you different possibilities, but it never gives you the ultimate possibility. The music is constantly trying to deny itself, deny the way it’s getting organized, and reorganize itself through these endless cycles. By the end, I think my audience would be quite perplexed to find that there’s no definite truth within the piece. I’m just trying to give them different possibilities for them to create whatever narrative they would like to create out of it.

The piece brings together three quartets (one instrumental, one jazz-based, and one visual). Can you talk about how these layers interact, and what audiences might expect to see as well as hear?

A string quartet is deeply rooted within the tradition of classical music and its performance practice as a chamber ensemble. My ensemble, of piano, electric bass, alto saxophone and drums, is also set up in the jazz tradition. Whether the music actually deals with jazz and classical music is another question, but certainly the instrumentation appears to be, and I was always quite interested to see how I can write a piece of music that is actually two different pieces in one.

The string quartet works completely independently on its own, and at the same time my quartet, the Phemo Quartet’s material, also works on its own. The piece is two distinct quartets, but they somehow come on top of each other and try to make some sort of dialogue with each other. The dialogue is not one that you might expect – this is doing this, and the other one is doing that, and let’s see how I can relate that. The dialogue is very much about the dissociation between the two quartets. It’s seeing how we can write a piece that dissociates certain elements and explores the different qualities of both at the same time.

In the same manner, the visual is doing the same thing. I consider the visuals completely independent of the music, but at the same time very related to it. Both the music and the visuals follow the same structural patterns. The visuals also have four different elements, so it’s very much a quartet as well: visuals, illustrations, notes about the process of making the piece, and anecdotes about the piece. All these four work together in the same way that both quartets are dissociated, the visual material also gets dissociated.

There’s a strong crossover in this concert between jazz and classical composition. How do you approach improvisation and structure in your writing? Where do you draw the line, or do you prefer to blur it?

Improvisation somehow expresses a real form of creation in front of the eyes of the audience, and I think this is very important because most music we hear is normally composed, and then we are exposed to it. This is a spirit that is present in many different types of music. I am deeply into free jazz and free improvisation, and I quite often like to inject that spirit into my music, convincing the listener that what they’re hearing is a product of real improvisation, of real music-making in front of their eyes.

But since the music works in blocks and you don’t know what’s going to happen 40 seconds later, I suddenly cut. Then you find yourself in a completely new territory. You acknowledge that what we’re hearing was actually not a product of real creation, but an artificial imposition of improvisation.

How does it feel to have your piece premiered alongside a world-renowned artist like Marius Neset?

Marius is one of the key figures in European jazz, and it’s an absolute privilege for not just me, but also our ensemble, to share the stage with him on the same night. In terms of our music, Marius’ music is very much driven by European jazz and the European tradition of improvisation. In contrast, my music is very much coming from European composition tradition, but also my improvised background (apart from Persian music) is very much coming from American jazz. I think the audience will find it quite interesting to witness two different pieces that are trying to create a dialogue between two different traditions and two very different ways of thinking, and see how they can make certain connections between the traditions of their own.

Ephemerality and Recurrence premieres on Thursday 20 November at the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall alongside Marius Neset’s Changes, as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival.