Insomnia / بی خوابی by Ashkan Behzadi / Yousef Abazari

About our album "Insomnia:"

The modern experience of poetry recitation as a genre dates back to the era of the Constitutional Revolution in Iran. Literary and artistic societies, associations, and even friendly gatherings led to the emergence of poetry as a new genre with new themes that reached a wider public. These poems, in addition to their aesthetic dimension, brought a social and political aspect to collective poetry recitation by critically addressing social issues, raising public awareness, and engaging with emerging socio-political concerns.
In the 1940s (1320s in the Iranian calendar), with a slight opening of the political scene, the rise of cafes, cultural circles, and the socio-artistic programs of various institutions expanded, allowing poetry, through its recitation, to enter the public sphere even more prominently.
With the import of sound recording technology and the advent of mechanical reproduction, the experience of listening to poetry took on a new form. In the repressive atmosphere following the 1953 coup, poets transformed the tradition of poetry recitation through the use of recording technology. Modernist poets who sought new expressive forms for Persian modern poetry—such as Ahmad Shamlu, Forough Farrokhzad, and Mehdi Akhavan Sales—became increasingly interested in the technological possibilities of the modern era to recite their own poems and publish them as audio recordings.
Perhaps the widespread distribution of these poetry cassette tapes, amid the oppressive atmosphere following the 1953 coup and beyond, marks the early signs of a new civil society. In this new medium, the element added to poetry recitation was the use of music to construct an atmosphere—sometimes composed specifically for the album and sometimes selected from existing music to accompany the recitation. At times, the music enhanced the richness of the experience; at other times, the disjointed coexistence of music and poetry disrupted the listener’s engagement.
The main idea behind the album Insomnia is to create a cohesive and intertwined whole of poetry and music, as a response to this long-standing tradition of poem recitation and musical accompaniment. In this work, the fusion of music, poetry, and vocal interpretation reflects the experimental and modern spirit of the selected poems.
The poems featured in this album are by six modernist poets from the first half of the 20th century—Georg Trakl, Paul Celan, Ted Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Vladimir Mayakovsky—all selected from the book Poets: Selected Poems and Essays from Baudelaire to Stevens, translated by Yousef Abazari and Morad Farhadpour. All poems in album Insomnia were translated and recited by Yousef Abazari. The music for piano and electronics was composed and performed by Ashkan Behzadi.

Ashkan Behzadi, 2025 Ernst von Siemens Composer Prize and Guggenheim Fellow, is an Iranian-Canadian composer based in New York. He holds a DMA from Columbia and teaches at Manhattan School of Music. His music explores the link between modernist lyric poetry and sound, blending lyrical miniaturism with echoes of ethnic musical memory.

ashkanbehzadi.com