More Info
Debut album (on Kieran Hebden’s Text Records) from British-Armenian producer Hagop Tchaparian.
Hagop’s debut album Bolts features ten tracks of hyper-personal rhythm music that mixes techno with field recordings of his travels through Armenian and Mediterranean culture.
The 10 tracks on Bolts, combine the audio evidence of a life’s experience, with the notion that lo-fi techno can be the right canvas for conveying that experience. Hagop’s been gathering these sounds and vignettes for almost 15 years, having begun accumulating them before the smart-phone in his pocket included a “record” function. He would isolate sounds from videos that his friends sent, like the Armenian wedding clip that showed members of the party jumping over a fire while a drummer played in the background. He would stop street musicians to ask if he could record their playing, like the women playing the qanun, a harp-like Arabic string instrument; or he would record with professional musicians playing specialist instruments like the zurna. He visited places important to his family, like the Lebanese village of Anjar, where his father’s family took refuge after being driven out of the Armenian- Turkish town of Musa Dagh in 1939, documenting his own steps on the gravel roads his father once walked.
The result is the sound of a man chasing his heritage around the world, while sprinkling clues of his everyday life amidst the manipulated folk instruments of his ancestry. There are aspects of tactile remembrances in between these rhythms, at times the result feels explosive. From its title down to the incessant bleating of the zurna, “Right to Riot” is like a punk techno that cries for the disaffected. Whereas “Timelapse,” which features a loop of the music that accompanies the fire-jumping wedding ritual sews together what seem like connected images in a photo album that may be physically decomposing, but whose power remains.
The album’s bangers offer an almost secondary, magnetic purpose. “Come for the beats,” they imply, “but stay for the emotional content.” With this in mind, great though these beats are, they’re not easy — Hagops’s globalized narrative complicates this party’s soundtrack beyond the margins of ethno-cultural chill-out comps. The beauty and the storytelling here are beyond obvious genre or form: ‘Bolts is a very particular and this is Hagop’s excavation of his Armenian heritage through a lifetime’s worth of remote recordings.
Tracklist
- Timelapse 3:46
- GL 2:56
- Escape 2:44
- Flame 8:52
- Raining 3:40
- Right To Riot 5:00
- Round 4:00
- Jordan 4:05
- Ldz 2:06
- Iceberg 3:09
Soundwave
https://youtu.be/vwCLswbTe58