Hagop Tchaparian Made One Of 2022s Best Dance Albums Out Of Sonic Memories
One of the first sounds to be heard on Jacob Zaparian Polts ' debut CD is that the Anglo-Armenian artist is literally following in his family's footsteps. The soft tap of shoes on gravel to the sound of a 26-string Arabic instrument was recorded in the Musa Mountains of Turkey, where several Armenian villages were once located. Chaparian's father was born here, from where he had to flee with his family at the age of three.
"He didn't intentionally try to get my fingerprints," Chaparian told Rolling Stone . “I was logging in and walking around, and when I heard it later, I was like, 'Hey! Wow, those footprints…” It made sense to me.
For Chaparian, sound recordings do what photographs do (or did for Madeleine Proust); "The voices bring me to the place," she says. He's been making these recordings since he was a kid, taking pictures of his life and traveling with everything from a tape recorder to his iPhone to a portable camera (although he's ultimately less interested in videography). The extensive archive he's amassed is the key to Bolts , out today 21st October on Four Tats Text, a brilliant and imaginative collection of club dance music laced with memories, personal stories and everyday noise.
Chaparian, who grew up and still lives in London, got his start as a guitarist in the British rock band Symposium, which had some success at home (and even to some extent abroad) in the mid-to-late 1990s. increasingly enthusiastic about dance music. After Symposium broke up in 2000, he immersed himself in that world, hitting Four Tate and Hot Chip, working as a tour manager and doing other backstage work. He also dabbled in remix projects and toyed with synths, but didn't find inspirational purchases until around 2014, when he began merging his music with his treasure trove of sonic memories.
"I was playing the synthesizer and I was like, 'Okay, this sounds like everything, but it doesn't mean much to me,'" Chaparan recalls. “When I was in this town, somewhere, somewhere, and these people were playing drums, and I recorded it. Where is it?'
One such drum, with which Chaparian was "obsessed" for many years, was recorded in Ainchar, Lebanon, in 1939 during the annual commemoration of Armenian refugees who had left their homes in the Musa Hills, including Chaparian's parents and his family and.
"Everyone was in a frenzy," Chaparan recalls. “They were playing drums, they had hypnotic instruments and everyone was dancing. I can feel this electricity in the air.'
Chaparian brings that electricity to Flames, a nearly nine-minute wonder that shines a light on the essence of Bolts' passion and the universal fervor that flows from it. Chaparian says he didn't set out to "make a statement" about the album, though he's clearly pleased that this fusion of music and memory has evolved so naturally into a narrative that acknowledges family, history and diaspora. A note of surprise lingers in his voice as he recalls his last live performance of "Flame"; "It was wonderful to feel the atmosphere in the room, to think where it was coming from..."
Along with chaparral sounds recorded in Ainger and Mt Musa, Bolts captures everything from the atmosphere of a New Zealand rainforest to fireworks at a football match in Lebanon to European trance blaring through taxi speakers in Jordan Several songs, such as the aforementioned "Timelapse", contain recordings by two musicians with a conservative education on the streets of Armenia in the Chapari language. Although clearly extremely talented, Chaparan says his game still had remnants of a "Soviet-style machine learning system." He invited them into an art space normally used for drawing classes to make another recording, encouraging them to play outside the old academic style.
"Eventually they went wild and I caught some of them," he says. “It wasn't necessarily the most energetic, but it was very emotional, and at one point I was in tears... It's worth standing and feeling the emotion that comes from people playing this instrument. For everything. Time your lives and nothing else.
When creating Bolt, Chaparian knew he wouldn't let his music touch his mechanical notes. "I've heard a lot of records where people have used instruments like the ones I've recorded and put beats under them," he says. "At the time, I felt like I could convey that feeling... ...when I listen to those records, I want to honor those emotions, but also have the feeling of adding that amazing sub-bass."
Creating any kind of art is often an all-consuming job, and for Chaparian, creating a song can sometimes "take you too close to the coal face and not hear it for a while." But he knows that when he comes back, he will still have that carrying capacity. "That's very important to me, as opposed to, 'Oh, it's just, you know, Café Del Mar or something.'
Knowing the history, it is important not to underestimate the personal and historical context contained in all of Bolt's words. It remains a defining feature and the kind of rabbit hole that offers rich rewards for serious listeners. But Bolts ultimately succeeded because it was crafted with the care, passion and intent that underpins all great dance music (to make you dance, of course). Even Chaparian's 89-year-old father, who is experiencing so much history on this album, can feel it.
In the summer, Chaparian took his father to a big outdoor show where he played with Four Tet. The last song of their set was the Bolts ' signature song "Rite to Riot", an extraordinary storm of controlled techno chaos recorded in Los Angeles, Paris and Ajaccio. When the tune started, Chaparian's father walked into the DJ booth, stood to the side and started dancing.
"I don't think I fully understood how I did it," Chaparian says with a smile. "But he's definitely excited about it."
