SHAPE+ broadcast series : Farzané

"The mixtape is a selection of pieces that have influenced my work, aside from academic and more known pieces in the history of electronic music. I curated this mixtape with a focus on pieces that employ texture and organic gestural dynamics as primary compositional elements, seeking works where the traditional boundaries between patterns and textures dissolve into more fluid, experiential sonic landscapes. Each selection demonstrates how different composers and performers from various genres create meaning through playing this boundary. The pieces featured here showcase an approach to composition where texture becomes the narrative driver—whether through the layering of instrumental colors that breathe and shift like living organisms, or the use of extended techniques that blur the line between various degrees of sound surrogacy. These works embrace what I consider to be gestural authenticity, where musical phrases unfold with the irregularity and spontaneity found in human movement or natural processes, creating compositions that feel less constructed and more discovered, as if the music emerges from the inherent properties of the instruments and performers themselves rather than being imposed upon them. The organic quality I've sought manifests in pieces that allow for micro-variations in timing, intonation, and articulation that would be impossible to notate precisely but are essential to the music's expressive impact, creating a sense of aliveness and immediacy that connects directly with our embodied experience of sound and movement in the physical world. "

Farzané (Farzaneh Nouri), an Iranian sound artist, creative coder, and researcher based in the Netherlands, works at the intersection of experimental music and computer science. Her ongoing practice-based research focuses on embodied knowledge in human-computer free improvisation. Embracing AI’s fundamental otherness while establishing relational connections, her practice aims at creating conditions of genuine encounter and collaborative destabilization between the artist and the machine. This speculative approach moves beyond technological determinism and cultural essentialism, exploring how human and machine intelligences might co-evolve through creative tension and collaborative aesthetic discovery.

Farzané is an act of the SHAPE+ platform for innovative music and interdisciplinary art, co-funded by the EU and Pro Helvetia.