Mo Farzaneh Maps Qeshm Island’s Shifting Soundscapes on Aerial Roots

Qeshm Island usually enters international coverage as a strategic point in the Strait of Hormuz. On Aerial Roots, Mo Farzaneh approaches it as a living acoustic environment, building electronics from field recordings made across the island’s coastlines, villages, mountains and Hara mangrove forests.

The Iranian composer moved to Qeshm after years in Tehran and learned to listen as an outsider. Wind, birds, water and traces of human activity appear throughout, but not as decoration. Farzaneh treats them as structural material. Tracks like “Doulab” revolve around a figure borrowed from the traditional water wheel, while “Distant Memories” translates wave movement into electronic texture. The thirteen-minute title track pushes further, letting the natural ecosystem gradually reclaim the foreground from its synthesised counterpart.

Farzaneh noticed how Qeshm’s acoustic balance shifts near piers and other centres of human activity, where certain species disappear beneath boat noise and human sounds become disembodied. Yet the album never turns this into an environmental manifesto. Vulnerability sits inside the repeating tidal cycles themselves, where nothing remains sonically fixed. As Farzaneh writes of the Hara mangroves, an ecosystem whose cycles have repeated here for thousands of years is now more fragile than ever. The title’s metaphor works precisely: these roots are airborne, retaining traces of place while detaching from any single ground.