Mohammad Reza Mortazavi extends tradition without abandoning it. Nexus – his first LP since Ritme Jaavdanegi (2019), released on the French label Latency – marks his most radical step to date. For the first time, he incorporates voice, effects and electronics. These elements expand the rhythmic vocabulary of the already virtuosic Iranian percussionist – not as ornament, but as an organic continuation of the Persian drum tradition by other means.
A piece such as »Particle« revolves around a barely shifting percussive figure, looped into a pulse that draws you into trance in under three minutes. The following »Kimiya« strips the material back almost entirely – the endlessly extended breath of alchemy, reverberant impulses, a wisdom that precedes systematisation. »Hidden Current« invites cavemen and astronauts to dance together, placing archaic drum patterns beneath shimmering, almost synthetically disembodied sound loops.
Nothing here is one-dimensional. Everything is in motion. Now based in Berlin, Mortazavi does not preserve tradition in his music. He lives it. »Life« is not by chance the central word in »Woman, Life, Freedom«. In the opening piece »Zendegi«, Mortazavi translates the syllables of the protest into rhythm, taking them apart, shifting accents, building a new structure from them. A gesture towards home, a gesture towards the future. Nexus makes clear: expansion is fidelity. Tradition survives by transforming.
Nexus
