Ritornello at Love’s End sounds the tune of protracted mourning: a life irrevocably altered by illness, a global pandemic, a genocide sanctioned by empire’s rot, the repetition compulsion of crushed uprisings. Composed and produced over five years, Rouzbeh Shadpey’s debut LP—and first release under his own name—alternates lament and speechlessness; threnody and silence. The sonic palette Shadpey cultivated as GOLPESAR remains, sharpened and distilled: Persian plunderphonics, electro-acoustic gestures, macro-compositional experimentation. Yet a newfound weariness saturates the work. Fatigue modulates each piece, pulsing and punctuating Ritornello like breath. The music emerges from this exhaustion and is carried by it. The composer at the mercy of its metronome.
Across the album, abstraction is dialectically threaded with legibility. Tonal harmony, spoken text, rhythmic motifs, and field recordings serve as anchors within cooler sonic geometries. Genre conventions are disregarded. Samples collaged promiscuously. The expansion of Shadpey’s practice into visual art and writing during the album’s creation manifests in newfound spatial and lyric qualities. Track titles such as “Chant,” “Speech,” and “Clap Concrète” gesture toward the internal abyss created by signification within sound. The album’s cover—a copy of Pascal Quignard’s The Hatred of Music resting on a stand where a score would ordinarily sit—underscores this tension. In the wake of devastating loss, music appears both radically inadequate and a precious balm. A refrain reframing love’s end, endlessly.