Description

Flowfish Records: Mohammad Reza Mortazavi - Codex - Audio CD

Brand new! Factory packaged! As pictured! Buy with confidence!

Product Details:

Product Type: Audio CD (Digipak)
Label: Flowfish Records
Catalog Number: ff0046
Distribution: Broken Silence 15147
Artist: Mohammad Reza Mortazavi
Instrument: Tombak (Persian frame drum)
Genre: World Music / Persian Percussion / Contemporary
Release: 2013
Publisher: Flowfish Records (www.flowfish.de)
Barcode (UPC): 4250727800469
LC: 12011
Condition: Factory Sealed

Product Features

Format: Single CD (square digipak, oversized format)
Total Playing Time: 45:17
Packaging: Premium square digipak with Fibonacci spiral artwork
Language: No lyrics - solo percussion instrumental
Made in Germany

Overview

Codex is a solo tombak album that arrives looking nothing like a percussion record should. The oversized square digipak, dressed in pale grey with a Fibonacci spiral etched across it, is a quiet declaration of intent: this is music built on mathematics, breath, and the logic of natural proportion.

Mohammad Reza Mortazavi is one of the most technically extraordinary tombak players alive. The tombak - the goblet-shaped Persian hand drum - is typically a supporting instrument in classical Iranian music. Mortazavi has spent his career dismantling that assumption entirely. On Codex, he plays alone, and the album consists of a single five-part work: Shish-Hashtom, meaning "six-eighth" in Persian, a reference to the rhythmic cycle that runs through the entire piece.

What Mortazavi does within that cycle over 45 minutes is genuinely hard to categorize. The tombak becomes a multi-voice instrument - bass tones, snapping rim hits, fingernail textures, and overtones layered simultaneously at speeds that most listeners will struggle to process as coming from two hands. There is no overdubbing. The complexity on this recording is live and real.

Codex is both a showcase and a meditation. Listeners who come from jazz, minimalism, or contemporary classical will find familiar structural thinking in unfamiliar sonic territory. Those already in the world of Persian classical music will recognize a master pushing his tradition well past its conventional edges.

Released in 2013 on the German independent label Flowfish Records, this is one of the defining solo percussion albums of the past two decades.

Interesting Facts

The tombak (also spelled dombak or tonbak) is a goblet drum originating in ancient Persia, traditionally used as the primary rhythmic instrument in Persian classical music. Its name comes from the two core strokes: "tom" (bass hit) and "bak" (treble hit).
Mohammad Reza Mortazavi was born in Tehran in 1981 and began studying tombak at age seven; he moved to Germany in 2002 and has since performed at major world music festivals across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
"Shish-Hashtom" (شش-هشتم) means "six-eighth" in Persian - a direct reference to the 6/8 metric framework that structures the entire work, though Mortazavi treats it as an elastic, breathing organism rather than a rigid grid.
The Fibonacci spiral on the album cover is not purely decorative - Mortazavi has spoken about the relationship between mathematical proportions and rhythmic cycles in Persian music, where certain complex rhythms mirror the logic of geometric sequences.
Mortazavi developed a technique called "tornado" - a rapid rolling stroke that produces sustained tones on an instrument not generally considered capable of sustain - which features prominently throughout Codex.
Flowfish Records (Frankfurt) is a specialist German independent label focused on contemporary world music and cross-genre percussion; their catalog includes some of the most significant hand-drum recordings of the 2000s and 2010s.