Breather Loops by Shoeb Ahmad

Shoeb Ahmad conceived of the Breather project during peak lockdown on the Australian continent. Ruminating on a dry season marred by devastating bushfires led Ahmad to start writing the A Body Full Of Tears album. Plunged into isolation and confronting the trauma of environmental degradation and pandemic realities, Ahmad decided to continue exploring and started to create a space for long-form, meditative compositions. That space was also important for processing the new, lockdown realities of working from home and wrangling two homeschooled children.

Ahmad performed these new mediations, the Breather sessions, in the middle of the day and live-streamed them so people could tune in and meditate and reflect along with the music while they had lunch, read a book, or work. As life started to go back to “normal” – the kids were back in school and Ahmad was back in the office – the Breather concept died down for a bit. In late 2020, she was given a grant that covered lost income from live performance in return for creating a body of work with the Breather concept. This time rather than do something durational, Ahmad played with the idea of using simple 10-second videos from her surroundings creating shorter works that could play as infinite loops.

These loops, when collected together, could be randomized to dovetail in and out of a playlist with a sense of endlessness. These works drew on a sound palette recorded for many previous projects over the years but reshaped and contorted into new forms, many unfamiliar with the artists who performed them with Ahmad. It was an exercise in restraint – adhering to an ambient wallpaper aesthetic for continual respite from the uncertainty we currently live within.

Atlantic Rhythms releases deep, contemporary music on limited-run cassettes, hand-screened posters, and digital formats.

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