»Doom ∞ Bloom« is the theme song of the new collaborative project between the Berlin-based musician Martin Steer under his Bad Stream alias and the transdisciplinary artist Arash Akbari from Tehran. The music will be made available as a stand-alone album under the name »Doom ∞ Bloom« in summer on Steer’s ANTIME label, its release will be preceded and complemented by the publication of a number of music videos and a live presentation of the material as well as exhibitions of the project in both physical and virtual spaces.

 

Picking up on the themes the two artists have been exploring in their respective bodies of work as well as across a number of different collaborations in the past five years since the release of Bad Stream’s debut record in 2018, »Doom ∞ Bloom« musically and visually explores speculative dystopian and utopian models of a future shaped by the on-going climate crisis as well as processes of technological automation. Rather than just asking questions about how the world may look like after the catastrophe, it dares to imagine possible answers. »While we're in the post-Anthropocene era, AI and automation are forming a new radical landscape that may also exclude humans,« explains Akbari, who is also active as a solo musician and has recently released an album of avant-garde electronic music on Berlin’s Karlrecords in 2021. »The project tries to visually speculate on the earth's future and analyse how current AI as a strong catalyst can be used as a tool to visually reveal its own agency. It explores the characteristics of a fictional world with and without human destructive activities« Pointing out that they had developed the idea already in 2021, Steer explains that they trained the AI for half a year while he was working on the music before they combined both elements for the live show and the upcoming music videos. While the two artists’ approach is based on a seemingly simple dialectical process of juxtaposing sounds and images representing apocalyptic predictions and unfettered hope, both their methods and the resulting outcome are marked by complexity of doing what has become nearly unthinkable: imagining the future(s)...

 

As the first single and music video, »Doom ∞ Bloom« perfectly encapsulates and illustrates the project’s concept and aesthetics. Steer composed the piece originally on electric guitar and piano. Heavily inspired by early minimal music as well as his interest for ambient, psychedelic electronica and posthistorical sound imagination he collaborated with Berlin hornist Otto Zart and Paris violinist Héloïse Lefebvre, who had already contributed to the multi-collaborative 2020 Bad Stream album »Sonic Healing« and arranged strings for the track as well as working with Steer on other pieces for the project. Using recordings of animal voices from for example extinct birds as well as guitar and violin sounds that try to emulate birdsong as well as digital glitches, machine noises and ambient sound, »Doom ∞ Bloom« interweaves the underlying ideas of the project by bringing the different sounds represented by them into a creative and ghostly interplay. Also Akbari’s visuals complicate the assumed duality between the natural world and human creation by both contrasting representations of these concepts with each other while also letting them blur into each other.

 

Both musically and visually, they together create an ambiguous, exhilarating whole: a glimpse of what’s to come and how it may sound like...