Aria Rostami & Daniel Blomquist

Aria Rostami and Daniel Blomquist are from San Francisco, CA, though Rostami has recently moved to Brooklyn, NY. Rostami and Blomquist's work occurs at two stages, the gathering/preparation of source material and the live performance. Primarily, Rostami and Blomquist's source material focuses on, digital information and the exchange of that information, repetition and decay, and non-involvement or surrendering aspects of creative control. The source material is either sampled and altered by Blomquist or composed and recorded by Rostami. Sometimes this material is thrown back and forth to be altered and sometimes it's processed only once or barely touched. The music is then turned into a loop and recorded to tape. For live performances Blomquist manipulates tapes with guitar pedals, a Moog, and modular synthesizers, changing the quality and predictability of the digital source material. By using loops, Blomquist can take a short audio clip and concentrate on processing it live and allow for improvised changes to that recording over long periods of time. Rostami adds in extra layers of drones, fuzz, beats, melodic ambience, improvised melodies and crescendos with synthesizers. Their compositions explore dynamic relations between digital and analog sound creating quiet transitions and soaring peaks.