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When I posted about the soundtrack to Memoranda a couple of years ago, I didn’t have anything to say about the credited composer, Vahid Ghaderi. This is because I couldn’t find any information about him whatsoever, which I didn’t immediately find suspicious since a lot of small, one-off games end up being made by folks with little to no footprint. Not a complaint or anything! It’s legitimately cool when art emerges mysteriously from the mist.
In this specific case, though, the problem was just that transliteration between languages is fraught with peril. He seems to personally use the rendering of Qaderi for his name, and if you search the internet for “Vahid Qaderi,” you actually get results! An Instagram! An interview! A SoundCloud! A Bandcamp with an album on it! I enjoyed his slightly strange, sound design-y ambient jazz soundtrack for Memoranda, so I’m excited to have an original album to dig into. But first, I should probably introduce him properly now that I can, yeah?
Qaderi is an Iranian musician and 3D artist who’s now based in Austria, where he is or was studying in the Interface Cultures program at the University of Art and Design Linz, which is about human interactivity with art and technology. A lot of his work seems to be for live shows, exhibitions, or VR, often in collaboration with his wife, Razieh Kooshki, who’s also an interactive visual artist. Some of that work is under the group name Vivid Q, like this performance at a venue in Linz in 2022.
Qaderi doesn’t seem to release actual albums super often; there’s Exinter The Second World, released in 2017, and then there’s ABOUT ENGINE released in 2024, and that’s it aside from a couple of random contributions to compilation albums? ABOUT ENGINE is certainly less ambient than his score for Memoranda, much more active compositions generally with a few tracks getting into EDM/IDM territory. The instrumentation and electronic production is pretty similar to the synthy jazz of Memoranda, so you can see a connection there, though it feels a bit more sample-y, like it’s not an original jazz piece but rather manipulating recordings of jazz pieces (though I’m not sure this is actually the case and it’s not just evoking that for effect).
The music is at once chaotic and disorderly, cacophonous with random noises that aren’t always beat-aligned, but also orderly and rigid, with many tracks being built up with repeating figures minimalist-style. Some tracks also mess around a little with tape noise, pitch/tempo, or instrument cutoffs, giving it a bit of a glitchy feel at times, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it glitch music specifically except maybe in one or two cases. So if you add all that up, it’s pretty weird!
I ended up liking this a little less than I feel like I should, and I can’t quite place my finger on why exactly. It’s continually surprising and interesting, so I absolutely enjoyed it, but a lot of the pieces didn’t necessarily gel for me as something beyond a collection of individual parts. Which is where normal people would retort “that’s because the music is obviously just a sloppy mess,” and maybe that’s exactly what it is and I’m just so deep into the rabbithole of experimental bullshit that I can’t tell what’s intentional and what’s not any more. There’s a lot of clear intentionality throughout in the composition and production, but maybe it was just a little too “things just randomly happening whenever” for it to fully come together for me. Still had fun listening to it, though!
Recommended tracks:
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“Noisy Headlights” was the overall weirdest piece I think, after it collapses at 1:50
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“9&0_1_SYS” was the most straightforwardly EDM track on the album
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“washing room” is pretty random melodically in a way that reminds me of the Pikmin 2 cave themes, I like the little shot of polymeter in the EP at 2:17
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“v328” starts off sounding like a slower, dub version of a track from Bomberman Hero (“monogenic” is the most direct match I think)
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“persi” funnels the chaotic energy into sounding really gosh-darned pretty
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