“To live between two cultures is to never quite belong to either, to perpetually seek firmer roots in the present while fighting the fear of forgetting where you have come from, or even that place forgetting you.” So we wrote when introducing Horror Vacui, the forthcoming album by 9T Antiope on American Dreams. Hailing from Iran and now based in Paris, duo Nima Aghiani and Sara Bigdeli Shamloo use the project to explore the nuances and difficulties of the expatriate experience, but the surreal new concept album pushes this style even further and reaches cinematic levels of imagination. The liner notes set the scene:
Picture this: there’s a big house at the end of the street. When you walk past it, you can’t tell if it’s full or empty. Its two caretakers—who, to add to the uncanniness, wear crimson suits—clean the house, inspect it, and carry out headcounts. Sometimes they only count themselves. Sometimes they count hundreds of people. They don’t know why this is the case, why the house has so many rooms and stories: it’s not their job to know. One day, as you walk past, a void enters and the house explodes. What happens to what’s inside? What impact does it have on your memory?
With Horror Vacui, 9T Antiope paints such a world in all of its strange wonder and dread, evoking the titular fear of empty spaces while simultaneously interrogating exactly why nature abhors a vacuum. The result could be said to teeter on the edge of something—the line between memory and amnesia, growth and decay or order and chaos—but equally there’s a sense of remove. As though the record were a liminal space captured and preserved, a place outside of the ordinary delineations, free to shift as it sees fit. Latest single ‘Mount 22’ presents the style in all of its mysterious weight, where the surface’s fine detail is disturbed by a simmering weight stirring below.
Horror Vacui will be released on 12th April via American Dreams and is available to pre-order from the 9T Antiope Bandcamp page.
