Bleep

Scavenged Speech and Sonic Witnessing by Abbas Zahedi

In a world where surveillance is routine, albeit without a sense of exactly who or what may be listening, Wiretaps for Oral eavesdrops its way into witnessing. Refusing to tidy the mess of contemporary Iranian life, without resorting to idealised diasporic narratives. Rather, it scavenges presence from within the flux: filtering signals from manifold sources—state TV sermons, grief‐stricken siblings, NHS influencers, domestic abuse helplines, jazz solos, and UFC callouts—each treated with an attentive sense of urgency. The scope is neither nostalgic nor extractive. I’m tempted to call it xeno‐epistemic sampling, or tapping into something palpable yet still pre-conscious; churning, in real time, without a need to rationalise or make itself sensible.

I first saw Jason Nazary and Saint Abdullah share a stage at Café Oto in London (during the Sagome series last summer). Jason’s percussive response to Mo’s extensive audio archive didn’t just drive the rhythm; it disrupted expectation, pushed textures into the throats of sampled voices, making room for the abrasive and the intimate to dwell together. In Wiretaps for Oral, the hardness from that live sonic blend is transformed—not softened but cradled. The album holds its intensity within a surreal sense of the intimate: vocals pressing, private, and with the immediacy of a family of ghosts. Jason’s drums, cymbals, and percussive interjections are never too upfront; they anchor and respond as counter-dialogue. They let silence be as important as noise, allowing space for signals to whisper amidst an ever-changing flicker of sonic spectres.

There’s a passage in my early writing where I asked, how can otherness be different? What I meant was: how can we stay with the unknowns that difference makes possible, rather than collapsing them into recognisable scripts? Saint Abdullah’s technique of sampling, whilst listening for the first time, reminded me of that impulse. This isn’t sampling as revisionism. It’s not an exhausted arrangement of material into something palatable or pleasing. It’s more like spiritual interception—some sort of a sacred broadcast in passing, without knowing its intended audience. The result is not a patchwork, but closer to séance—fragments suspended mid‐transmission, sutured not by resolution, but by an impulsive hunger for resonance.

The Iranian cultural sphere is vast—both within and beyond Iran’s borders—always having had a porous relationship to genre, authority, and terms of address. Whether it’s the mullahs on late‐night TV soliloquising steadfast to get an emotional climax, now even with synth pads infiltrating their yearly recitals for rituals of self-flagellation; all the way to medic-influencers in the NHS vlogging softly from flatshares in the outskirts of London. These are performances intended for continuity and the building of legacy. In Wiretaps they lose any sense of spectacle, becoming a gathering of survivance set to time. A collection of archetypal introjects, re‐sounded as part of a wider aural ecology: full of crackle, timing, laughter, feedback and grief.

Improvisation, in this context, isn’t a genre issue—it’s a governance of sensitivity and attention. A method for momentary alignment. A way to “be sufficient as we are,” to borrow Saint Abdullah’s phrasing. What coheres this album is not a theme, but a proximity—a set of scattered moments gathered with care, left intact and continuing to circle back. The process recalls what was once described, in an earlier collaboration with Kazim Rashid—creative director of Resident Advisor—as growing under pressure. That there are lives which have been forced into multiplicity—by war, displacement, censorship, by the decades-long campaigns of systematic Islamophobia—and yet, in the compression, something new condenses. Not a singular culture that is able to overcome it all, but a frequency of gestures. A sensorium of refusal and repair.

In my experience of Wiretaps, Jason’s drums seem to weave intricately through languages, snippets and eras. I hear a practice that resembles a surgical procedure for an unknown condition, a response to living in a state of remedial openness. His ability to step in and out of time, sprinkling brushes and unexpected hits—creates a trippy trance-like turn in the record which really takes hold from the title track onwards; descending into something I can only describe as down-tempo-rave-meets-therapy-gospel. It’s as if the album listens back to the wiretap. In moments when a voice trembles, when static bleeds into speech, subtle tempo changes or shifts in vocal accent or the percussive timbre draws you closer to the freedom of not needing sense.

There is no romanticised vision here, nothing exotic. Instead, the duo offer care by simply listening—listening as a checking in with the zeitgeist of a people that feel familiar, and listening to the pulse and shift of their own improvisational system, responding on the fly and recording it all in one take. This web of listening rejects all passive forms of engagement—it’s entirely relational. What it builds towards is a tension that feels very familiar for the events and occurings of a state of affairs defined by wiretaps and data traps—containing grief and comedy, reverence and satire, the jazz bar and the gun range, between the story of a cockroach crawling across the pulpit during a sermon and the bellow of a synthesised elegy for the Women, Life, Freedom movement. But this tension is generative. It lets each element breathe in proximity to the other, without the burden of synthesis. In the collapse of distances, something exceeds commentary. A minor‐key opera of the dead and the living.

In an era of surface knowledge—what Saint Abdullah aptly calls the ‘tellectual condition—this album dares to be slow, tangled, and temporally disobedient. It doesn’t explain itself. It records. It reroutes and rehearses listening as solidarity, where the collage of sampling is not another form of post‐modern play, but a structure of feeling—a gathering of signals into something close to kinship.

Listening to Wiretaps for Oral, I am reminded that it’s not just the samples that speak, but the spaces between them. The cracks where the signal breaks, where latency or a dropped beat becomes intimate awareness. And perhaps that is enough. Not to deliver meaning, but to hold it—to tap into it—without forcing it into form. The duo invite us to press our ear to the wiretap and catch whispers of an exchange. In doing so, they remind us that staying close is more to do with listening than to do with distance.