sheng, flute, B-flat clarinet, santur, 2 tars, percussion, erhu, viola and double bass

Premiere: February 18, 2021, Montréal / Nouvelles Musiques 2021: Musique sans frontières, Montréal (Québec)

Pareidolia means seeing familiar faces or patterns in random objects, for example, while looking at the clouds or mountain rocks, we see particular shapes, mostly facial characteristics. During the time of composing this work I wondered, now, due to less human interactions, do people see more human features in unrelated things and objects rather than before? Everything that we are going through in our present time feels new, unbelievable, and sometimes overwhelming as we are entering some dream which affected the whole world. The time now continues not forward, but more inward.

The poem spoken at the beginning of the piece is by the Tajik-Persian-Indian poet Abdul-Qādir Bedil (1642—1720). The original poem:

Nishoti aishi jahonro
hamin qatar guftam,
Ki ba soyai rami ohu
nishastamu raftam.
An approximate translation:
About the joyful essay of life,
I would say just like that:
I found myself for a while
In the shadow of the running deer horn
and left away.

[x-21]