The sophomore record from Tehran based Hesam Ohadi’s ‘Idlefon’ project is a mysterious and dark escapade into a style of electronic music that places experimentation front and centre in its ethos. Replete with dreary and visceral sounds that weave together intricate soundscapes to craft an ambient record that is anything but background music. It’s heavy and cold, filled with a brooding tension that has you absolutely transfixed to the core. On the opening track itself, which is also the titular one, the aural tension ascends with an intensity that’s overwhelming to the listener.
The album is his first for Oakland-based emotive experimental label n5MD, and it finds Ohadi taking inspiration from Adam Curtis’ Oh Dearism shorts reflecting on the globes’ modern-day state of turmoil. Ohadi’s record is a statement piece against where he sees society falling into, an ever declining condition across the globe. Far from an easy record to play in the background like what you’d assume ambient would be, ‘COLDSTREAM’ is a focused project. You can’t really have this on without being hopelessly drawn into its ominous and almost haunting aura that covers you in an equal sense of despair and amazement.
A fibrous and impeccably stitched together collection of drone, glitch, and industrial motifs, ‘COLDSTREAM’ is a vocalisation of Idlefon’s ideology in a mesmerizingly expressive piece of experimental electronic. If you enjoy opening your ears out to records that provoke intrigue, that necessitate introspection, and that transfix you entirely, this is an experience well worth falling into.