What Year Is This?
The duo of Joshua Strawn and Zohra Atash that comprise Azar Swan are some of the most politically outspoken and well informed individuals in the international music scene.
Following their lamentation of David Bowie’s ‘This is Not America’ earlier this year, Azar Swan have shared ‘The Golden Age of Hate’, a song that was their most “immediate reaction to the dark turns the world has taken recently”.
The video was directed and edited by Zohra Atash herself, and conceived by the band as a cathartic means of making sense of the distortion field of recent years’ events. It is a re-imagining of the ominous “brainwashing scene” from “The Parallax View” in which a montage of text and imagery is used to enhance a potential recruit’s tendencies to dehumanization and violence.
Propaganda traditionally seeks to influence people by distorting reality to create a specific portrait of what’s true. In 2017’s “Post-Truth” world, propaganda has become a performance art that works quite differently. It simply overloads us with so much information and negativity we become exhausted with trying to figure out what’s true.
This video seeks to counteract both forms of propaganda, by condensing information into an accurate picture of reality, making an attempt to portray violence of different kinds—verbal, sexual, and political–in hopes that the viewer will become repulsed, rather than encouraged to engage in such violence. This functions through the simple juxtaposition of images and actual quotes from those being represented!
The Golden Age of Hate was recorded last December at the band’s studio in New Orleans, mixed and mastered by Peter Mavrogeorgis. who has recently contributed his studio savvy to records by Boy Harsher and The National.
The single promises to bridge the gap between the previous two Azar Swan LP’s, and the new one due out this fall via Aufnahme + Wiedergabe.
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