Ehsan Saboohi Articles

In Memory of David Cope
13.06.2026 Article
In Memory of David Cope — Now Available Post-Orientalism Music has released In Memory of David Cope (PO.0158), a new album by Nik Masoo, dedicated to the memory of David Cope (1941–2025). ─── Liner Notes by Ehsan Saboohi In Memory of David Cope (1941–2025) David Cope passed away on May 4, 2025. He is widely recognized as a pioneer of computer music and one of the first composers to seriously explore the relationship between musical composition and artificial intelligence. Yet his importance ...

QuarkTonal Composition System
30.05.2026 Article
Album Title QuarkTonal Composition System Composer's Note The pieces in this collection are built on a technical system developed across three earlier publications. This note summarizes the musical foundations established in that work. The philosophical arguments — involving Kant, Badiou, Rancière, Said, and Freud — are not repeated here. What follows concerns only the musical tools those arguments were written to justify. The Pitch System The basic unit of measurement in the QuarkTonal system ...

What Cannot Be Deferred
15.05.2026 Article
What Cannot Be Deferred Ehsan Saboohi Tehran, 2026 What Cannot Be Deferred I. Beginning from the Situation, Not from Theory Every composition, before it becomes organized sound, is a position. That position usually remains concealed: in opening sentences, in references, in methodological explanations. Yet no theory speaks from outside the situation. No composition stands without ground. Every form rests upon a material base, and every material base already distributes the possibilities of ...

Call for Collaboration — Sonitus Project: Post-Orientalism Anthology
25.12.2025 Article
Call for Collaboration — Sonitus Project: Post-Orientalism Anthology In 2025, the Post-Orientalism label released eight volumes of the Sonitus anthology, comprising 105 individual works, sequentially numbered Sonitus No. 1 through Sonitus No. 105. The Sonitus project adopts a research-driven approach, treating Sonitus not as a fixed audio object but as an ontological event. The focus is on sound as a site of disclosure rather than on formal or stylistic coherence. Volume 9 is scheduled for ...

Materialism and Temporality
22.11.2025 Article
Materialism and Temporality by Nik Masoo Liner Notes by Ehsan Saboohi Section I — Materialism and Temporality: Foundational Concepts Marxist materialism understands being not as a fixed substrate but as a ongoing process generated within concrete material relations and practical activity. It breaks decisively with any substantialist or ahistorical account of reality. In the dialectical view, matter is not a passive given but a dynamic field of determinations whose character emerges through ...

Imaginal Isomorphism: A Preliminary Inquiry into Reading and Understanding “Mystical Literature” as Fantasy
16.08.2025 Article
Imaginal Isomorphism: A Preliminary Inquiry into Reading and Understanding “Mystical Literature” as Fantasy Ehsan Saboohi Composer and theorist of Post-Orientalism “Is Rumi’s understanding a form of fantasy? Can we say that there exists no ontologically substantive thing called mystical literature?” This Note is a structural and algorithmic study that examines the isomorphism of narrative texts within the framework of Post-Orientalism and genre analysis. The focus of the Note is strictly on ...

post-orientalism and the evental possibility of emancipation from ethnic self segregation in the east
23.07.2025 Article
Title Post-Orientalism No. IV: The Cultural Sound Blocks of Humanity Vol. 7 – Radif of Iranian Music for Qanun By Nilufar Habibian About the Album post-orientalism and the evental possibility of emancipation from ethnic self segregation in the east Liner notes by Ehsan Saboohi 1 The qanun and oud have played a fundamental role in the formation and transmission of musical knowledge across the Middle East and Central Asia. These instruments carry modal and rhythmic systems while simultaneously ...

Q Time Machine: Rethinking the Ontology of Time and Musical Structure
07.07.2025 Article
Q Time Machine: Rethinking the Ontology of Time and Musical Structure Liner Notes by Ehsan Saboohi Abstract Q Time Machine redefines musical time through a novel rhythmic system inspired by the quark in physics. This project explores a non-linear, relativistic concept of time, using the desarkaten, a traditional Iranian percussion instrument, and integrates Python programming for generative composition. The liner notes detail the Q system, its philosophical underpinnings, and its educational ...

On post-orientalism as a Genre by Kristoffer Cornils
06.06.2025 Article
Liner note: On post-orientalism as a Genre by Kristoffer Cornils Most artists hate it when the music they make is considered to be part of a certain genre, and it is easy to see why. After all, creating art is an act of deeply personal expression, or so we have been told again and again. Being lumped in with a bunch of strangers whose music shares some similarities with the ones they make thus strips artists of their individuality. Being categorised, crammed into a genre, feels like an ...

Post-Orientalism Anthology: Sonitus (On the Inconsistent Multiplicity of Sonitus)
28.05.2025 Article
Post-Orientalism Anthology: Sonitus (On the Inconsistent Multiplicity of Sonitus) Liner Notes by Ehsan Saboohi 1. In the Latin conceptual tradition, particularly within Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, the term Sonitus transcends mere acoustic or sensory connotation, bearing profound ontological significance tied to the notion of substantial motion (motus substantialis). Here, Sonitus is not reducible to "sound" or "noise" as understood in contemporary human experience. Far ...

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