Let Death Live is my first album-length release, recorded in London and Singapore during the pandemic. It’s a tribute of sorts to people – and a time of life perhaps – that I’ve lost, that we’ve all lost over many years. It's about the cycles of life & death, grief & joy, loss & acceptance, tautness & resolution, harmony & dissonance.

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Let Death Live

I worked on this EP at home in London, in planes, and in half a dozen spots around the world, including a chilly Welsh cottage. I captured sounds in Manchester, London, Singapore, Washington DC and even a Malaysian kampung, and I've tried to weave those memories in throughout. All the while, I was thinking of Yasunari Kawabata, wondering how one might do with melodies and triads what he does with words on a page. I didn't quite get there, but some of you might catch the references...

Not Dreaming Anymore EP

Let Death Live is my first album-length release, recorded in London and Singapore during the pandemic. It’s a tribute of sorts to people – and a time of life perhaps – that I’ve lost, that we’ve all lost. It explores the cycles of life & death, grief & joy, loss & acceptance, tautness & resolution, harmony & dissonance. The album is largely instrumental but includes some of my own vocals, exploring a choral format inspired in part by Missa Solemnis, by multitracking my own voice and performing parts from tenor to soprano, occasionally manipulated to create ‘impossible’ sounds. It opens with the curious rhythm of my father’s favourite grandfather clock that we grew up with, and later you’ll hear his slippered footsteps the very last time that I walked with him towards the end of his life. In one track he talks about his own father and grandfather, sneaking out into the desert at night to look at stars, something that I aspire to do one day. There’s another track I composed for my aunt more than 30 years ago – she never heard it of course but the presence of her absence has been with me since. There’s little obvious percussion, though a lot of tempo and key changes, as well as experimenting with the experiential limits of dissonance and saturation, attempting in one track to harmonise with shepard tones. I’m mostly an electronic musician, but I prefer the setting and context of a symphony or film to a nightclub, the expansive narrative of a Pink Floyd album to a collection of discrete pieces. I’m not sure the music would have been quite to my father’s taste but I feel he might have recognised the influence here and there of music he used to play, everything from the Beatles and Keith Jarrett to the King’s College Choir and ghazals.

Vitality

Shrapnel

Sister

Remission

Crowd of Stars

Crowd Of Stars

Tilt

Undone

Akhirah is the first track from my upcoming debut album ‘Let Death Live’, about the circularity of life & death, grief & joy, loss & acceptance. Titled after the Islamic term for the infinite and humanly incomprehensible experience of afterlife, Akhirah is built on layers of synths and samples from everyday life, the curious rhythm of my late father’s favourite clock that sat for years on the family mantelpiece, and cries of my infant nephew wailing for his mother.

Akhirah

All tracks composed, produced & performed by uah • Mixed & mastered by Dominic Rippel, Shelter Studio, London • 4-track EP • Limited edition 12" vinyl available February 2017 • every sleeve unique, artwork by David Cuesta • available at https://u-a-h.bandcamp.com and http://spoti.fi/2BMdOcO

Only One EP

Only One

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uah – Only One

All tracks composed, produced & performed by uah • Mixed & mastered by Dominic Rippel, Shelter Studio, London • 4-track EP • Limited edition 12" vinyl available February 2017 • Every sleeve unique, artwork by David Cuesta • available at https://u-a-h.bandcamp.com and http://spoti.fi/2BMdOcO

Linger On

uah – Linger On

I wrote 'After Words' when I was trying to make sense of the difficult times a friend was facing. I didn't know whether to be stoic or sad or just be true to the trepidation I felt inside. Recording it helped me decide to be all of those, and more.

After Words

'Snow Country I', about empathy, was originally composed for SUPERGESTURES, a large-scale outdoor multimedia performance by LingQL. 'Snow Country II' is about everything else. So they're here together, in their entirety.

Snow Country I & II

'Cage of You' was composed and recorded on my childhood piano in one take. It just poured out, a song about the boundaries we impose upon ourselves – even those we place between that which is real and that which is not.

Cage of You

'Song' is an old tune by Lewis Taylor. I threw it over the edge of a boat, and this is what the trawlers dragged up. LingQL on sax.

Song

'Supermoon' took years to complete. It keeps coming back to me in waves, like the flow of the track.

Supermoon

Composer and multi-instrumentalist ‘uah’ (aka Usman Haque) creates spectacular interactive events and massive audio-visual experiences that have opened the Singapore Biennale, the Dubai World Cup and Toronto’s Nuit Blanche. Trained as an architect, his multi-channel sonic work builds on infrasound, electromagnetic spherics, the harmonic possibilities of shepard tones and neural-net driven ultrasonics. His work often engages members of the public using their own voices to drive collective experiences. As an experimental electronic musician, he performs with synths and a range of instruments, as well as his own voice, composing dramatic and cinematic music influenced in part by the improvisational narratives of ghazals and early prog rock.

uah

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