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Artist Interviews
Q&A: Hiatus
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 13 April 2011
Born in Iran, London-based producer Hiatus self-released his first LP ‘Ghost Notes’ last year via Lucky Thunder. The well-received album demonstrated a deftness for creating expanses of warm, cinematic electronica, and spawned a debut single in ‘Save Yourself’, which took its vocal samples from old Persian albums that Hiatus discovered amongst his father’s record collection in Tehran.
Out earlier this week, Hiatus’ follow-up track ‘Insurrection’ is a collaboration with dub poet Lyndon Kewsi Johnson, reworking Johnson’s 1981 reggae original ‘The Great Insurrection’. The track envelopes more of Hiatus’ diverse musical influences into a pulsating electronic soundscape, also serving to place a sharp contemporary focus on the 30th anniversary of the Brixton riots.
He’s just compiled a mix for CMU’s Eddy Temple Morris, which he will playout while sitting in on Xfm’s ‘X-Posure’ show next week, so we caught up with Haitus, whose real name is Cyrus Shahrad, to gauge his responses to our Same Six sort of questions.
Q1 How did you start out making music?
I’ve been playing the piano since I was five, although I can’t read a stitch of music. At school I did the band thing and obsessed over hip hop; at university I discovered dance music and started DJing. Then in 2002 an American friend mailed me a copy of Reason and a MIDI interface, and I turned my Peckham flat into a makeshift music studio.
Q2 What inspired your latest album?
It was a summer working as a journalist in Tehran, my first return since my family fled the revolution in 1979. While there I discovered my father’s Persian record collection in a corner of my grandmother’s house, and spent the hours between editorial shifts hunched over his old turntable, sampling the vocals and string solos that ended up on the album.
Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
I tend to rattle off the bulk of a tune in an evening, then spend weeks procrastinating over levels and EQs, worrying about reverb and compression and whether the piano is occupying too much of the snare’s frequency spectrum. ‘Ghost Notes’ was ostensibly finished in late 2009, but I kept remixing and remastering until October 2010.
Q4 Which artists influence your work?
I find more that interests me in old music than stuff that’s currently coming out. There are obviously contemporary artists for whom I have great respect – Loscil, Stars Of The Lid, Four Tet and Burial, for example – but most of the time I listen to traditional Iranian music and melancholic classical stuff.
Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
I’d try to let the music do the talking, although the new single, ‘Insurrection’, could use a little background explanation. It’s a collaboration with dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, who raps about the Brixton riots of 1981 that levelled the streets both he and I call home. The single, which was released on Monday [11 Apr], marks the 30th anniversary of the riots.
Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
Right now I’m juggling remix work with rehearsals for a live show, but my focus is on the follow-up LP, for which I’m planning to return to Iran for a couple of months to sample musicians and instruments and the ambient sounds of harbours, mosques and bustling bazaars. I’d like to make an electronic record with a truly Iranian heart.
MORE>> soundcloud.com/dj_hiatus
