A video by artist Sahar Homami (A.K.A. S A H A R) that animates a piece, ‘Simple Rotation,’ by Canadian composer John Farah has won Best Music Video at the 2018 Experimental Superstars Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia; it also placed 3^rd in the Best Experimental category at the Berlin Music Video Awards.

John Kameel Farah is a CMC Associate Composer and pianist living in Berlin who has played such prestigious venues as Berlin’s Volksbühne and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Kölner Philharmonie, Hamburg’s new Elbphilharmonie … and the legendary Monarch Tavern in Toronto.

Farah is also a prolific visual artist who creates series with as many as 200 drawings. One of these pointillist ink creations inspired the music that became “Simple Rotation” (from his album Time Sketches).It then became the starting point for the animated video creation by SAHAR, an Iranian/Canadian multidisciplinary artist who also lives in Berlin.

John Farah explains, “The drawing is a set of circles, each containing a smaller circle, each made up of many rows of points. The contrasting directions of the rows creates a kind of perpetual motion that is both steady and uneven. The background of the music reflects this with a gently repeating ostinato on one note, like an endless row of point-dots, alternating between synthesizer and piano tones, as other chords and textures unfold around it … Sahar transformed it into different planes and layers of depth in her video, and in the last few seconds it reveals a semblance of the original drawing.”

Sahar says that in her video she tried to give breath to Farah’s music, which she sees as an “open living system that is in entropy, moving towards equilibrium… The whole process started with the music, which was resonating with these atmospheric landscapes. I could almost immediately visualize flying through this endless space.”

Time Sketches is out now on the Neue Meister label. John Farah’s latest album is Strands.