Hiatus – real name Cyrus Shahrad – is a London based British-Iranian producer who has just dropped his new album “Distancer”. We spoke to Hiatus about the inspiration behind the project and the creative and collaborative processes that produced the LP.
Hello Hiatus! Welcome to DMCWORLD. Your latest album Distancer is out this week, what inspired you to make it?
Thanks for having me. It came out at midnight, and it’s now 4am, and I’m too wired with excitement to sleep. In terms of inspiration, this is my fourth album, and it feels like the culmination of a process that started long ago, when I first became aware of the music of Iran, my father’s homeland. We left Iran after the revolution – I was too young to remember it – and in the years that followed he would often listen to warped cassette tapes of his favourite musicians, singers like Hayedeh and Googoosh, whose voices seemed both foreign and familiar to me growing up.
How does this album differ from your last projects (All the Troubled Hearts, Parklands, Ghost Notes)?
I began sampling Iranian vocals and instruments soon after I started making electronic music – my first album Ghost Notes is pretty indebted to my dad’s old record collection. But this is the first time I’ve worked with Iranian musicians: a singer called Malahat and her partner Faraz, who plays an Iranian string instrument called a kamancheh. Over the two years it took to make the record they became a huge part of it, heavily influencing the overall sound – Mal sings on three tracks, Faraz plays on eight out of ten. They also became close friends: last week we enjoyed a Norouz (Iranian new year) picnic together, and Mal is kindly helping me brush up on my Farsi.
What was the creative process like?
Covid kind of dictated the terms under which the record came together. Luckily the songs were mostly written, but the vocals and many of the instruments hadn’t been recorded, so that had to be done remotely, which was a challenge. I’d moved back to my parents’ place when the first lockdown started, and I set up a studio in my old bedroom, so the mixing I did there, a process that took me until new year. I was so grateful to have the music to pour myself into, and I was lost once the tracks were all signed off.
The album clearly has a strong Iranian influence, with your father reciting poetry and with Faraz and Malahat appearing on most of the songs. How have you dealt with travel restrictions over the past year? Has it affected your creativity at all?
I’m glad you mentioned my dad – this is our second spoken word collaboration after Delam, which closed the last album (All The Troubled Hearts). It means so much to me to share his voice with the world, though he’s completely oblivious to how many people have been touched by his words. And yes, the travel thing has been a blow. He and I generally travel to Iran together for a few weeks each year, and obviously we’ve not been able to do that recently. Since we were last there his mother passed away, and a couple of his close friends. It’s been hard on him, and I miss it immensely. But thanks to Faraz and Mal I’ve always felt connected to Iran, and I hope this record will reach Iranians around the world.
What motivates you to create new music?
A few years ago I would have said it was an attempt to make some sense of my life, to find meaning in this experience of being in the world. These days it’s the thought that my music might make life more bearable for someone else, though in turn of course that makes it more bearable for me, so maybe nothing’s changed.
Do you have a dedicated creative space, or do you find inspiration wherever you are?
I tend to record basic ideas on my phone while sitting at the same out-of-tune piano in my parents’ house that I played growing up, then over time I’ll develop them in my studio, which these days is in my flat in south London. I think breakthroughs come when the mind is free to wander, so I spend a lot of time walking or cycling around the city. For years I was more or less chained to my studio, and it was a pretty miserable existence. I’m trying to enjoy the process more. Maybe that comes across on the new record.
What is next in line for Hiatus?
It’s a weird time to be thinking about playing shows, but I get asked a lot, and for years I’ve put it off, because I’ve never felt ready. But I’d like to do it now, so my plan for the coming months is to start on a live set – figuring out which songs work together, breaking them down and coming up with a way to perform them. Faraz and Mal are keen to join me on stage, so the dream is for it to be a sort of evolving collage of old and new tracks interspersed with live vocals and instruments, ideally ending in a bit of an old-fashioned mashup. Maybe I’ll even get my dad to come on stage at some point, though he’d obviously upstage me.
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