AZADI.mp3 has no intentions of setting down boundaries. An artist thriving in multiple disciplines, the past 12 months brought a successful TV series and a glittering EP, amongst sundry other creative endeavours. Also known as Juliette Motamed, the British-Iranian polymath is a force of nature in We Are Lady Parts, and this energy manifests in a different way when they hit the studio.
Future-facing pop music drawing on cross-conduit creative energies, their new ‘CONTROL’ EP is exceptional – merging aspects of their heritage with a desire for free-thinking musicality, it’s a stunningly original piece of work. AZADI.mp3 – azadi means ‘freedom’ in farsi – is a vessel of independence, a meeting point between all manner of sounds, disciplines, and styles.
“I think most creative pursuits have a way of flowing into each other, like one hand washing the other,” they point out. “When I started DJing I would gravitate to the pads because they felt familiar, like samplers. As I learnt more and played out in clubs I loved how ephemeral it all felt and the conversation that happens between the DJ and the people dancing. The experience is so elastic, it’s sick; that connection with the audience has challenged me to make different sounds, different beats.”
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Taking this impulse into the studio, AZADI.mp3 allows these sessions to become places of penetrative truth-saying – no matter the cost. ‘Control’ is an EP built around soul-searching, with the electronic maven pinning down often ephemeral emotions. As they put it: “The songwriting that interests me most comes from that place of looking for truthfulness, even if it’s complicated. Mine tends to be a patchwork of images and feelings from my life, stitched together in a new way.”
Moving on from their earlier work – songs that felt like “the first step in building a confidence from the inside out instead of the other way round” – this new EP is a point of graduation. Technically skilful, emotionally impactful, ‘Control’ aims to pin down the “soaring freedom that comes with letting go”.
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Aiming to sum up their quest for freedom, AZADI.mp3 comments: “It’s a place I get to go to put a name to the squirmy horrible little feelings we all have inside but have to repress in order to get through life. It’s where I get to make a sound, say a sentence, scream, yell, laugh, write a line that’s exactly the way I like it instead of a prescribed way that things should be. It’s a place I go to that’s free of the endless self-surveillance and self-critique. That feels freeing to me.”
A self-admitted perfectionist, nothing AZADI.mp3 releases isn’t filtered through a thousand re-writes and revisions – it’s all part of their process, as exacting and breathlessly inventive as that suggests. “I’m just really particular,” they state. “I know what I like and what I don’t. Or it’s because I wrote and produced all these songs in a really condensed period of time, and in a really like, specific time in my life. Or maybe it’s just that it all filters through my nasty little head and gets irrevocably tainted,” AZADI.mp3 laughs.
If there’s a cathartic impact in their work, then that’s for the listener to decide. AZADI.mp3 embraces creativity at its most continual, with their process continually undergoing revision. Each time they enter the studio, they emerge from a different vantage point, occupying a distinctive position. It’s always different, yet forever the same.
“I think making music is often the feeling of putting something to words – explaining a feeling in sound, getting something off your chest, being silly, being serious, being braggadocious, or even just being mundane. So in that sense, it’s where I get to explore all the different me’s I have inside. Apparently, that’s what that film Inside Out is like, but I don’t know I haven’t seen it!”
“I wouldn’t use the word therapeutic personally, somehow I feel like it implies that I may have some kind of answer, which I absolutely do not!” they laugh. “I just ask all the questions that bother me.”
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Words: Robin Murray
Photography: Adam Muscat
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