Sussan Deyhim & Richard Horowitz - The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985 –1990
The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985–1990 compiles an unheard, previously unreleased body of recordings by Sussan Deyhim and Richard Horowitz, dissidents from diametric backgrounds who met during the heady days of Downtown New York in the 1980s. This collection reveals the creative and life partners’ radical shared vision of avant-garde pop in all of its boundary pushing freedom, combining Deyhim’s singular approach to vocalization, Horowitz’s invention of new musical languages, and touchstones of traditional music from around the world, creating a new music that ultimately retains a voice entirely its own.
Despite their difference in backgrounds and respective journeys, at the time of their meeting in the early 1980s in New York City, Sussan Deyhim and Richard Horowitz were both products of the search for freedom and understanding (and resultant awakenings) that swept the globe and helped culturally define the late 1960s and 70s. Deyhim, born and raised in Tehran, spent her teens dancing with Iran's Pars National Ballet company, performing weekly on Iranian national television, and travelling her home country studying with master folk musicians and dancers, before relocating to Belgium and joining Maurice Béjart's prestigious Béjart Ballet of the 20th Century. Horowitz, born and raised in Buffalo, New York, had spent much of the decade before abroad, first departing for Paris under the shadows of the Vietnam War, where he studied piano, Eastern philosophy, and became entrenched the city’s free jazz scene, playing with the likes of Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, and Alan Silva, before embarking south to Morocco where his friendship with Paul Bowles helped cultivate a deep passion for the country’s musical traditions and a shift in his musical practice.
The pair met by chance sometime in 1981 at Noise New York, a small studio on West 34th Street founded by the musician and recording engineer, Frank Eaton, as a utopian creative laboratory that beckoned artists and bands like Arthur Russell, Christian Marclay, Liquid Liquid and Butthole Surfers into its orbit. Both artists had recently relocated to the city, Deyhim having begun to more actively incorporate singing into her practice, notably recording a vocal score for choreography she was doing at La MaMa Experimental Theatre and and Horowitz having recently released his debut album, Oblique Sequences (Solo Nai Improvisations), on the legendary Paris based imprint Shandar, and fallen in with members of New York avant-garde like La Monte Young, Jon Hassell, David Byrne, and Brian Eno.
Initially bonding over a cassette tape of field recordings made by Paul Bowles that had been given to mutual friend and writer Brian Cullman (seeking answers for Ornette Coleman’s question "what is the sound of sound"), their earliest collaboration was documented on Horowitz’s 1981 album, Eros In Arabia, with Deyhim contributing vocals to the track “Queen Of Saba.” Over the coming years, their deep connection would routinely gravitate them into the studio, culminating in the body of recordings that would appear on their 1986 album for Crammed Discs, Desert Equations: Azax Attra. Unknown to nearly all but the artists, laying in wait over the decades on numerous multi-track and stereo reels, DAT tapes, and reference cassettes, were a vast array of recordings made by Deyhim and Horowitz bookending Desert Equations.
The 13 pieces represented on The Invisible Road were recorded largely between Noise New York and Daylight Studio in Brussels, during a period that Deyhim describes the partnership between herself and Horowitz’s as seeking a music “free of any specific cultural reference, with a personal musical signature,” blossoming into a body of sonority that embraced the energy of contemporary boundary pushing pop and the avant garde, filtered through their mutual love and study of various musical traditions from across the globe and deep engagement with the ideas and tactics of experimental music.
Undeniably rooted in Horowitz’s study of the North Africa ney and the music of the Berber and Gnawa cultures during his time in Morocco, Deyhim’s deep engagement with the folk traditions of Iran, and the couple’s immersion in the interconnected Downtown underground music scenes, each piece on The Invisible Road offers its own vision creative and cultural hybridity. Deyhim sings in both English and Farsi, as well as a composite tongue that she developed by drawing upon numerous indigenous vocal techniques from around the world, intuitively responding to Horowitz’s simultaneous sound syntax forming and combining a wide range synthetic and acoustic instrumentation, and experimental tape techniques, within a visionary series of free-standing expressions.
The Invisible Road traverses a remarkable amount of ground over the five years that these recordings were laid to tape. Perhaps even more so than its logical counterpart, Desert Equations, this collection sculpts an alternate vision of both avant pop music crossing over into mainstream 1980s and Fourth World musicality (which Horowitz was concurrently honing while playing in Jon Hassell’s band), presenting a music that almost entirely disregards the standard tropes and aesthetics associated with either, and reinventing them according to the artists’ own terms. As Deyhim put it: “How do you bring the indigenous, ancient cultures into now, without forgetting what the essence of their vibration is?”
Illuminating previously unknown aspects of the enduring creative partnership between Deyhim and Horowitz, The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985–1990 will be issued as a limited vinyl edition from RVNG Intl. and Freedom to Spend, with newly commissioned liner notes penned by Jack Denton. The work was compiled in close collaboration with Deyhim and Horowitz over several years, and completed just before Horowitz’s untimely passing at the age of 75 at their home in Morocco in April 2024. The album’s release is a tribute to his life and work, as well as the remarkably inspiring creative and romantic life that he and Sussan shared.
Sussan Deyhim and Richard Horowitz’s The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985–1990 will be released November 1, 2024 in vinyl and digital editions. On behalf of Sussan, RVNG Intl., and Freedom To Spend, a portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit Children’s Music Fund, a non profit dedicated to bringing music therapy into the lives of sick children to help overcome pain, fear and anxiety.
