Ash Koosha announces new album 'I AKA I' on April 1st

Ninja Tune are proud to announce the forthcoming release of a new album, “I AKA I,” from sonic-genius Ash Koosha. Born in Iran and currently living in London, Ash makes the kind of “mind-bending electronic music” (Pitchfork), which has had the cognoscenti buzzing for months.

Working mainly with his own field recordings, treating each sampled source as a physical object, Koosha squeezes, stretches, distorts and moulds units of sound before using a background in classical music—both Persian and Western—gleaned from his time at the Tehran Conservatory of Music to structure and shape the result into affecting, original and often beautiful movements — a process he calls “finding geometry in sounds.”

Koosha has already lived and done more than most artists do in a lifetime, not least being imprisoned in Iran for his music and having to seek asylum in the UK. More important to him are his current activities, from film and synaesthetic experiments to FACT Albums of the Year and support from the likes of Run The Jewels and Empress Of, to an interest in virtual reality which will lead to a world’s first VR “experience” of his new album, at special ‘viewings’ next year. His process sounds technical and the results are both destructive as well as constructive, but the resulting album “I AKA I” is also fundamentally human, and that’s set to take Koosha to a whole new level.

Ash Koosha has shared “Biutiful,” from his anticipated album I AKA I, out April 1st on Ninja Tune. The track puts an emphasis on what Ash calls the geometry of the music, developing playful patterns that warp and twist throughout the song. This is futuristic music to its core, using technology as a basis to develop sounds that engage emotionally as much as intellectually. Its melodic and rhythmic interplay demonstrated here is influenced by the traditional music of Iran, which Ash studed at the Tehran Conservatory of Music before being exiled to London.