kamyar “noak” karimi

Ārshiv-e Faryād — Archive of Shouts  
09.11–10.24.2026

Ārshiv-e Faryād — Archive of Shouts is a 60-minute sound work built from protest recordings from Iran spanning 1979 to the present. The work treats publicly available revolutionary archives, news footage, and circulating online recordings, as both historical trace and sonic material that still carries force. The piece does not follow a clean documentary timeline, but rather repetition. Certain sounds return across decades with new masks: chants that gather into dense crowd textures, voices pushed through cheap microphones, sirens that cut the air as signal and threat, and the low hiss of handheld recordings that never fully disappear.

In this piece, the archive is approached as a site of mediation, not a neutral container. The intention is to listen for what gets amplified, what gets flattened, what gets made credible, and what gets treated as noise. Composition becomes a way of thinking through these pressures. Electroacoustic processes such as filtering, compression, granular time-stretching, and spectral emphasis shift attention between speech and texture, between proximity and distance, and between recognition and abstraction. These transformations do not aim to beautify the material. They aim to make audible the thresholds where a collective voice starts to dissolve into ambience and manifest their nature as “sound-objects”.