susurrus / zemzemeh by Sholeh Asgary and David Rothenberg

Iranian American sound/performance artist Sholeh Asgary and ECM recording artist/clarinetist David Rothenberg performed an evening of new music at Bergen Community College’s Gallery Bergen on November 3, 2023. susurrus / zemzemeh was a part of the exhibition at the gallery, The Cup Flows Over: Art from the Soul of Iran presenting the art of contemporary Iranian artists from Iran and the diaspora. In March 2025 a catalog of the show will be published.

In susurrus / zemzemeh, recordings of water bodies are transcribed into notation for voice, performed by Sholeh Asgary. Consisting mostly of long notes, and with the help of electronics and synthesizers for those notes that are beyond human capability, the arrangement and layering of the notes create a sonic landscape that casts reflections of silence, dissonance, and possible occasional moments of harmony. Asgary explores illegibility, loss, and mutant transformation through the near-impossible task of performing voice for water. This work is inspired and developed through her ongoing research into indigenous Iranian underground aqueducts known as qanats and the lesser-known ancient practice of wedding them as an exploration of water scarcity, human displacement, and ecological loss within the context of intricate erotics and economies of reciprocity between human bodies and waterways.


Sholeh Asgary (b. Iran) engages performance, interdisciplinary forms, and collective processes to investigate, memorialize, and express the complexities of joy and survival inherent in diasporic and refugee experiences. Her work challenges colonial assumptions about what is heard, proposing new futures through sound. Featured in Art in America's 2022 "New Talent Issue," Asgary was a Bay Area Now 9 artist at YBCA, a 2023 Artadia Finalist, and part of the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (2024). She is exhibited in PST-Getty's Atmosphere of Sound and supported by institutions such as PICA, MASS MoCA, and Headlands. Asgary is faculty at UC Berkeley.


Musician and philosopher David Rothenberg wrote Why Birds Sing, Bug Music, Survival of the Beautiful and many other books, published in at least eleven languages. He has more than forty recordings out, including One Dark Night I Left My Silent House which came out on ECM, and most recently In the Wake of Memories and Faultlines. He has performed or recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, Elliott Sharp, Iva Bittová, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. Secret Sounds of Ponds is his latest book. Nightingales In Berlin is his latest film. Rothenberg is Distinguished Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

music often made in close collaboration with the natural world.

www.terranovamusic.net