Label Description:

Persian-American ambient producer sohme joins Phantom Limb’s Spirituals imprint for debut album Palm, a study of new fatherhood and changing stages of life for synthesis, acoustic instrumentation, and field recording, integrating a practice in architecture and two distinct cultural heritages.

Saumon Oboudiyat, aka sohme, is a Persian-American sound artist, producer and architectural designer based in Philadelphia. His music is informed by a decade of work in architecture and a lifetime of musicianship. Through a careful balance of soft harmonics, Eno & Lanois-esque melodic detail, slo-mo chordal shifts, and drifting, dreamlike field recordings, the music of Palm reflects Oboudiyat’s entry into parenthood and the accompanying transformation therein. “When I began working on the album in New York, we were just starting to see the other side of the pandemic,” he writes. “Upon completing mixing in my home studio, my wife and I prepared to welcome a new life into this world.”

Opening track and first single “These Are All My Thoughts” combines monastic reflection with a swelling and sirenic pathos, employing the kind of cosmic redolence that conjures early space travel documentary or hermetic contemplation. Hues of twentieth century German ambient production glitter and enshadow its powerful sonics.

Later, “The One, The Other” is more reminiscent of Middle Eastern musics. An oud-like pluck shudders and shimmers about broken and nonlingual vocal snippets, a howz of still water amidst a desert plain of sparse and arid instrumentation. Another key moment is “Signal”, and its deceptively pop-oriented chord structure. Housing clattering steps, shooting stars of high frequency melody, and single notes of conical synthesis that resemble the Persian karna, its soundworld is warm and enveloping, safe and secure.

sohme joins A Lily, Jan Esbra, Eamon Ivri, Sachi Kobayashi, Dau, Ibukun Sunday, Beqa Ungiadze, Suso Saíz, Menhir, Francsesca Ter-Berg, Dylan Henner, and Pram of Dogs (and others) on Phantom Limb’s Spirituals imprint, a sub-label offering works of high grade, emotive ambient and experimental music from emerging artists from across the world. Palm is his debut release.