Siavash Amini and Eugene Thacker release the album Songs for Sad Poets, Vol. III

Siavash Amini and Eugene Thacker have released Songs for Sad Poets, Vol. III, the third record the Tehran-based composer and the Brooklyn author have made together.

The method is the point. Thacker's poetry is performed by voice synthesis software, and Amini then layers those vocals up to 40 times and reduces them to abstract components, so what a listener hears is voice as material rather than as speech. Nothing on the album is audibly translatable back into the text it started as.

The series takes its subject from the poetes maudits, the cursed poets who often died young, and each piece is dedicated to one of them. "Sigils of Decay" is for the Brazilian symbolist Joao da Cruz e Sousa; "Dead Eyes, Dark Stars", which runs about 19 minutes, is for Nikolaus Lenau; and "Leprous Doubt" is for Han Mac Tu. Choral elements run through both of the longer pieces, functioning, as the review puts it, as a vocal graveyard of the dissected poetry.

Reviewing it for The Quietus on August 27, Finn Cliff Hodges described the pair as breaking poetry down to microfibres and threading it back through ambient composition. The whole album runs 38 minutes.

It follows a 2022 record of the same name, minus the volume number, which set out the concept the pair have been working through since. This third entry pushes the same idea further rather than changing direction.

The record sits at the ambient end of electronic music, a long way from anything with a beat, and joins the release calendar as one of the week's quieter arrivals.