Avant-opera, film bez slika. Ili: snimiš film a onda ga poželiš spaliti.
An album gets called cinematic when the music elicits the feeling of a wide shot, of a soundtracked scene, of prestigious drama.
SHELL is cinematic because it’s a movie. Vestigial, footgazing, inflammable,
SHELL is a movie with no stars, a movie with no film, that unfolds in unfolding, getting ahead of itself. Even the pronoun is in the can before she means to. So you hear SADAF: just trust your eyes. Audition requires participation, and here, off the top of her head, participation means filmmaking. The unmaking of, in stereo. Although there are no
bangers, there’s still the
magic of SADAF’s multiplying VOICE, playing over scripts. (Little fires, drowning onscreen, disowned from the spark that lit the faucet. Its instructions crossing themselves out, the skipping noise and scraping strings roll like credits, hand in hand, like the tide, a substitute for reaching through to the other side.)
“Though there is stillness, I can feel your heartbeat. Though I can’t see you, I can hear a sound.” Fear that you hear yourself, but you don’t listen.
–Pat Beane
To avoid tropes, through language, what can’t be avoided.
Nothing begins, no screen is raised, the words go up in flames.
Can a cliché, can a tale as old as time, can the experience of failure.
Yes, for some time, all she did outside of work was watch films in bed.
One day, with a little water, the BRD trilogy back to back.
One day Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
The day after that, she shook a pencil skirt off the rack.
She put on a cardigan and styled her hair into a low bun.
She sat at the kitchen table with her back straight against the hard chair.
She folded-up used parchment paper to be reused at a later date.
That date never came, the gripping feeling passed, the parchment paper, brittle now, fell apart.
SADAF tells a story of collapse and intentional erasure.
Failure, but a self-assigned failure, and the space to fail.
The story is of a scriptwriter who composes a screenplay that they cannot, or will not, release.
SHELL opens with the statement, “OK, I wrote a film, and now I want to burn it.”
Immediately, the story launches and we are launched as a listener.
Immediately, our attention is forced on, no easing in.
The trope of the chair, gripping it, eyes growing wide with each passing scene.
Paying attention to what comes off the top of her head.
SADAF composed SHELL by improvisation, and this is how this story is told.
It feels so natural, shockingly, because it’s actually so close to what we know.
A story told, to a friend, to oneself, is not rehearsed.
Off of our heads, we tell and tell, remember, backtrack, sequence each detail.
Some people are better storytellers than others; the way they develop context, suspense, exercise timing.
SADAF is a great one, broad and probing.
She articulates moments and steps back to let them breathe in our imagination.
In “OK, I wrote a film,” the narrator says, “Walking down the street in closeup, up the stairs, wide shot, dress gets snagged on the railing of the stairs.”
The dress is red, that detail was dropped earlier.
When the gun is shown, the gun will be used, eventually, a classic idea, through new classical means.
Scenes appear multivalent and in montage, and the focus alternates between crisp to overexposed.
The narrator speaks of a man making coffee in the kitchen. Who is the man? Who is she?
The whole of SHELL invites this kind of questioning, asks, “Is this torture, is this fear? Is this torture? Is this fear?”
Torturing the tropes of pop, I become fearful that something might go missed, a crucial detail to the plot.
SADAF obfuscates toward the total story, hers, and we see what we see.
Narrator states that they are “Burning the words, but not the images.”
In the third part, “I Don’t Own Anything,” it feels like the script may be speaking back.
SADAF’s singing voice changes from low and direct to high and childlike, or like a ghost.
This new character asks, “Am I dead now? Am I dead now?”
Yes, you are dead, because what cannot be said in the screenplay comes out, after the fact, from its shell.
It could not be said there, because the screenplay was too composed.
The script cannot be because its desire is its economy.
The script is something to be sold, acted, produced, directed, and perhaps this is the discomfort of its realization and the origin of its destruction.
“Am I suffocating you? Because you’re suffocating me,” says one to the other, and back again.
The script’s edifice suffocates into nothingness, and after nothingness, we can once again explore.
SADAF explores the possibilities of her own story, takes other directions, circles back.
Went to see a film, what was it about?
It’s about swiveling your brain around on a chair, your affectations.
It’s about making it up as you go, flushing your diary.
It’s about going to the post office, coming back, taking a shower, swimming around in it.
It’s about bags and bags of stuff and lighting little fires.
It’s about sound used as sound effects affecting emotion, diegetic and non -alike.
It’s about a script as stiff as ice, clicking a lighter on and off, swiping a match.
It’s about not having a penny to your name, whose name, what name, my dear.
It’s about her walking toward him, walking past him, having nothing to say.
It’s about writing a film, extending the truth, making a fiction of you.
It’s about a woman looking at her feet. - Cookcook
"Ok, I wrote a film/ And now I want to burn it," says Sadaf in a confessional tone on the opening track of her debut EP, SHELL, which, as she explains below, is named for the English translation of her Farsi name. It's a tactile body of work, one that finds the New York artist whirling through unpredictable soundscapes that, by turn, crackle, shatter, vibrate, and caress. Each track provides a clue to the record's loose narrative about the internal life of a young filmmaker, but Sadaf's sonics privilege sensation over legibility; it's a puzzle that will not be cracked.
SHELL is your debut EP. What did you want to explore in this first major artistic statement?
The album deals with identity formation/destruction through fiction. In many ways it is about the creative process and the anxiety producing affect of being defined by what we put out creatively. It is also very much about a rejection of reality as a vehicle of truth. In the same way that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe says,“What is excluded never fails to return,” I wanted to explore the idea that maybe fiction has a higher potential to communicate personal truths than a purely autobiographical work does.
In terms of the title, it is not only a literal definition of my name in Farsi (Sadaf means "shell"), but also refers to this blank identity; the frame or skeleton that can support what is projected on or into it; the idea of a blank script.
Did the narrative of the filmmaker shape the record from the beginning, or was it something that arose over time?
The narrative of the filmmaker is woven with my own personal narrative of the time and a need to escape that narrative. As usual, nothing was really planned; I tend to gravitate towards things without really knowing why. I’ve always wanted to make a film and I don’t have the means for that, so that desire was transposed onto music. The sounds used in the production eat away at each other and have the hisses and cracks of a fire. To me this isn’t even music, it's more a series of images and moods described through sound and rhythm, but of course we can also see pop tropes and structures coming back once in a while.
How does your live performance practice feed into your recorded work?
They are very different, but come from the same intention. They both start with improvisation, but recording later turns more into a drawing that is worked on and colored in, and of course it is a much more isolating experience since I work alone. Performing is definitely more cathartic, violent, physical, immediate, and social in its context. It’s hard to translate what happens live into a recording, so it becomes something else in the process. -
Ruth Saxelby http://www.thefader.com/2017/08/16/sadaf-shell-ep-stream
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