CLOT Magazine presents Alifiyah Imani - Your Listening is a Paracosm

CLOT Magazine

The next mixtape comes from Alifiyah Imani, an interdisciplinary arts & media practitioner and writer. Imani combines multimedia arts and design, focusing on sound, curatorial research and practice. She enquires into our relationship with space, the workings of our cultures and auditory subcultures. Imani told us that an important aspect of Indian classical music training is practising with the tanpura, a full-bodied stringed instrument that creates a repetitive drone. While practising and tuning the tanpura, the daily ritual of attuning myself to the drone as a sonic companion and as a practice of embodied listening and improvising has been significant for me to understand the structure of sound itself. She said. Last June Imani premiered at Distant Gallery her online solo show Your Listening is a Paracosm, a show that shifts perceptual perspectives through sound and ritual, drawings and prompts. Your Listening is a Paracosm unfolds as an experiment for the web and permeates through radio transmissions. We read in the statement. Taking this show as an inspiration Alifiyah Imani has prepared a mixtape for us that intends to explore the sound pieces from the exhibition as an extended listening or long-form mix. Imani spent much of this time in her home studio layering field recordings, experimenting with the drone sound of the Tanpura, and improvising with other instruments like the Strumok and overtone flute: It's about different kinds of attention processes, tuning, and studying forms derived from sound. While drone-based and contemplative, it moves between textures, harmony, polyphony of colours, and moments that emerge in nature and improvised music.