Beautiful Apparitions by Parham Ghalamdar

Tehran-born, Manchester-based artist Parham Ghalamdar provides a suite of raw & candid amateur-performed Persian folk, pop songs and poetry - all pulled from the audio on his parents archive of homemade VHS recordings documenting intimate, joyous & illicit gatherings in turn-of-the-century Iran.

"Beautiful Apparitions is a collection of audio excerpts from digitized VHS tapes recorded by my parents in early-noughties Iran. The footage depicts the secret double lives of Iranians drinking, dancing, and singing to celebrate life when owning a VHS player was illegal in the Islamic Republic. The footage is an amateur performance of pop and folklore songs about love, loss and life. Although many Iranians must have recorded such vivid moments, they are rarely made available publicly. Such tapes would usually have been well hidden, lost, or purposefully destroyed."

— Parham Ghalamdar

Tracklist

1.	The Magical Hand of the Night	2:32

2.	Believe Me, After You...	3:10

3.	My Beautiful Bird, Pt. 1	1:38

4.	Greengrocer	1:30

5.	My Death Is Infamy for You	3:05

6.	You Can Reduce the Distances	11:01

7.	My Heart, I Mistakenly Gave You My Heart	5:13

8.	My Beautiful Bird, Pt. 2	3:51

9.	Where Did the Spring Go?	4:56

10.	Six Days in the North and I Didn't Even Miss You	1:04

11.	I Returned Without You	2:09

12.	Winter is the Nude Garden	2:36

13.	My Beautiful Bird, Pt. 3	4:11