9T Antiope - Of Murk and Shallow Water EP

Pitchfork 78

9T Antiope, the duo of Nima Aghiani and Sara Bigdeli Shamloo, hail from Tehran and live in Paris, and from the sound of this self-released EP, they may as well be time travelers, for all we know. Part of their sound is very old: Shamloo’s singing bears traces of medieval European folk music, and her lyrics often resemble scraps of heroic verse, full of chariots and faeries and peppered with literary allusions. But Aghiani’s electronic production hurtles back at us from a distant future: digital static, dissonant chirps, the incomprehensible crackle of an AI crunching numbers. The results are eerie and enrapturing, like an itinerant bard warming her hands over a pile of burning dot-matrix printers.

Even though she never sings unaccompanied, the majority of the four-track EP scans, functionally, as a cappella music. Shamloo’s voice not only carries the melody; her singing is virtually the only tonal element here, and the occasional harmonies that she produces in combination with the flickering background buzz resemble someone singing over the drone of a walk-in cooler.

Meanwhile, Aghiani’s electronics balance the flat, affectless grey of a dead television with piercing sine waves and pinprick bursts of color. “Den” begins with two minutes of clanking metal, electrical hum, and panning static; in the background, a crow caws once and falls silent. In these long moments, his ambient industrial soundscapes have the vivid, mimetic feel of a radio play. The gurgling oscillators of “Brute” resemble Bebe and Louis Barron’s Forbidden Planet score. The four tracks work together like the movements of a suite, sharing a single mood and a single palette, and the whole thing comes to a head with the concluding “Edax,” the most melodic song of the bunch, which builds to a dramatic climax of long held syllables and heart-in-mouth glissando.

Shamloo’s lyrics are cryptic by design, which only adds to the music’s mystery; she describes her writing process as a kind of world-building exercise, sketching out elaborate narratives and characters and then boiling them down to a single salient detail. She favors assonant rhymes and slippery syntax, which makes the rare plainspoken phrases all the more powerful. “Men burn the chariots down,” she sings, mantra-like, in “Den,” before slipping into a speaking voice—“The lake is frozen/The lake is frozen”—accompanied by charcoal-colored static and a dull, desolate whine. Whatever it might mean, it is absolutely gripping, immersive and surrealistic, cinema without sight.