girl

CD + DL | Out on fri 15 march

single ‘undone’ out now

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Girl – the new album from composer Soosan Lolavar, conductor Kelly Lovelady and chamber orchestra Ruthless Jabiru – puts diasporic experience at the centre of a uniquely personal soundworld. Lolavar describes her music as striving to “create new forms which are tied to western and Iranian traditions, but not defined by these practices nor reduced to these elements alone”.

Lolavar and Lovelady’s collaboration is built not only on their friendship, but also a synergistic worldview. Ideas of diaspora and duality of belonging are similarly at the foundation of Ruthless Jabiru, Lovelady’s orchestra of Australasians in the UK.The ensemble’s vision is centred around humanitarian ideals, sustainability and the potential for building cross-cultural compassion through the ear.

The album opens with ‘I am the Spring, You are the Earth’, for santoor and string orchestra; a piece described by BBC Music Magazine as “a glorious, shifting collage of sound”. Given its semi-improvised nature, it is a work always in a state of becoming; iteratively produced in each new playing and listening. As such, it is the piece on the album which most closely represents Lolavar’s own emerging sense of diasporic identity.

The album follows with an orchestral expansion of Lolavar’s monody for detuned violin, ‘Undone’, a 2020 commission by Riot Ensemble responding to lockdown and the unravelling of life as we knew it. Its orchestral expansion for Ruthless Jabiru maintains the intensity and unconventional tuning of the solo violin, giving a self-contained sense of instability.

Sextet ‘Girl’ is based on an Iranian folk melody from which all material in the piece is derived. The melody is constantly altered, fractured and recontextualised, echoing the way that oral traditions subtly bend and reform over time and space. In this way, the piece explores folk melodies as collective memorialisation and what it means to both remember and forget where you are from.

‘Tradition - Hybrid - Survival’ is inspired by shifting identities and the continual reinvention/remaking of the diasporic self. Written during a period when Lolavar was travelling a great deal between the UK and Iran, it features a 4-note melody recorded from Iranian television as the basis of the solo cello. Over time the solo line expands and evolves, becoming increasingly complex and eventually bearing no relationship to the place where it started.

Considering the way these pieces reflect deep experiences in her life and work, Lolavar reiterates her hope that this debut portrait album inhabits a space far beyond ideas of fusion or hybrid art. “For me,” she says, “these can often fall into the trap of exoticisation despite their well-meaning instincts.”

Girl is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, the Mayor of London’s Back to Business Fund; 83 individual donors through Crowdfunder; and the Hinrichsen Foundation. Soosan Lolavar is supported by PRS Foundation’s The Open Fund.

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