Son of Rose is a music project with a relentless appetite for the unconventional in composing and performing contemporary musical ideas.
The approach to live performance evolves depending on the venue, concept, and overall shifts in ideas and inspirations. The studio lends it's hand to a more tedious ethic of stretching and bending instruments, pushing and pulling software and hardware in order to find thresholds to further a sound, or sometimes simply reducing it to an extreme hush and uncertainty.
The sounds captured and created by Son of Rose can weave in and out of the delicate and dense with dancing harmonic, tonal and textural complexities. When listened to with care, sounds that may not have been inherent to the composition can surface due to each individuals listening experience.
Discography
SOLO RECORDINGS
2008 Through Thickness | de5018
2007 Divisions in Parallel | der002
2006 Top Flight | de5005
2005 Son of Rose | de5002
COMPILATIONS
2008 Leather | de6003
2007 Cotton | der003
2006 Paper | de5008
2005 Family Affair | de5004
Interview
2006 Mixtape
Michaelangelo Matos
Paper Thin Walls
WEBSITE
Of course a city with as many tech programmers as Seattle is going to have loads of terrific electronic musicians. 2006 was a damn good year for them, too, from tech-house producer Bruno Pronsato’s tongue-in-cheek sensuality to the warmly cockeyed techno of Jeff Samuel (recently relocated to Cleveland, alas, though his Step was recorded in the Emerald City) to the 13 artists on Memex’s Cumulous compilation, a smart overview of the dronier, more experimental end of the city’s circuit-bending activity. “Crossings” leads off the comp and pretty much delivers everything you might want from it—shifting layers of aqueous drone that evokes, in no particular order, looming sunrises, long overhead shots of a church organ in a field, Tron scored by Boards Of Canada, ladybugs running through a maze, Terry Riley’s preferences in stereo panning, the mouth-feel of frozen margaritas and dozens of records with the same basic idea only not done this well. Which is, might as well be basic about it, an amazingly rich and pretty drone. Which is enough.
Kamran Sadeghi (a.k.a. Son Of Rose) on “Crossings”
Your bio states that you “actively [explore] the use of electronics and recording techniques in contemporary music, with an emphasis on computer synthesis as a live instrument.” To what extent is a track like “Crossings” “live,” per se. Was much of what we hear spontaneous, or did you try a lot of things and utilize the best of them?
Spontaneous. Of course I sometimes have a palate of prerecorded or synthesized sounds to choose from when I’m not processing a "live" instrument, but the actual composition or placement of sound was, and is in most cases, spontaneous.
You do a fair amount of live performing. What role would “Crossings” play in a situation like that? Is a performance for you more about improvising with elements of finished work, or do you present things more straightforwardly?
I try not to mix up my live performances with my recordings—I try and keep it seamless. I try and only record what I can do live. I need to be able to build a piece from scratch while in a live setting. If it is strictly synthesis then I try and have all of my synths at a value of 0 and build the composition from that value based on my reaction to the P.A. during sound-check, the room and my state of mind. If it is using an acoustic instrument then I try and allow the source sound that I’m pulling out of that instrument manually to be present in the piece at one time or another so that the audience—if willing—can hear the source sound before it is colored with computer processing.
“Crossings” is the opening track of a compilation. Was it something you had been working on or something you created specifically for this project?
Both. I had played with this piece previous to the request but hadn’t really given it much attention until the project was presented to me. It wasn’t specific to the project, but if it wasn’t for the project then the piece wouldn’t exist. This was also one of the inspirations for the title.
Live Reviews
Decibel FestivalSean Molnar
Signal to Noise
The Experimental Showcase was an oasis of minimalism. All four artists, Yann novak, Son of Rose, Richard Chartier and Taylor Deupree, opted to perform without visual displays, and the calm of the darkened theater forced the audience to focus completely on the sound emanating from the speakers on both sides of the stage. It brought to mind Stan Brakhage's approach to exhibiting his films. He said simply the he is a filmmaker. If you want narrative, read a book. If you want sound, listen to music. If you want to watch film, watch film. he forced audiences to appreciate his art for what it was, not what they wanted it to be.
Taylor Deupree's set was a hauntingly beautiful minimal soundscape that would have been equally at home at the Ambient Showcase.Yann Novak took a field recording of a machine noise and programed it into a long series of seamless permutations. Son of Rose's set stood out in that it was distinctly tactile amidst sea of computers. Using ebows on the strings of a grand piano, he manipulated the vibrations electronically or used them to trigger synth sounds that were in turn manipulated - a sort of electronically prepared piano performance that was truly experimental instead of impenetrably weird.
Decibel 06
Jefferson Petrey
Grooves Magazine
WEBSITE
The following two days continued in much the same format, with seated performance hall shows by day and club settings by night. The third night’s Experimental Showcase began with hushed tones and abstract concrete from Seattle’s Dragonseye label founder Yann Novak and label mate Son of Rose, who contributed a deft composition of laptop processing and prepared piano. The pairing of Taylor Deupree’s minimalist electronic label 12k and Richard Chartier’s home for digital sound-art Line was perfectly exemplified by each of their following sets. Where Charier’s sound was one of intangible looming tension, Deupree seemed content in basking the audience in the warm glow of software-extended acoustic resonance.
DECIBEL FESTIVAL (Part 3) :: Under Your Skin and Into Your Head
Mark Teppo
Igloo Magazine
WEBSITE
The Experimental Showcase took place at the Broadway Performance Center, a sit-down theater with about 300 seats. We were packed in like sardines (double-stacking 'em in the aisles by the end) as the lights came down and Son of Rose started the head-scratching evening with oblique textures and sonic time-stretching. The project of Kamran Sadeghi, Son of Rose welds sine waves and rumbles of static to jagged line drawings that darts around the video screen backdrop. As Sadeghi adds textures and layers of sonic scrap to the simple sine wave foundation, colors start to bleed into his black and white imagery and the room begins to feel a little more humid as if we are witnessing heat lightning banging against the edge of the horizon. Lights flash and vanish, leaving retinal burn and the beatless sounds roar and wash over us like sharp arcs of expressed sound. In the end, he explodes with a sharp pop of sound, a spatter of feedback like he's just breached the sound barrier. More pops follow, a cascade of noise bursts that trail in the wake of the initial fracture. Pop. Pop. Poppoppop.
<< Back
