“Quite often when I go to concerts, I do think about the fact that as composers, we choose to put certain things next to each other, but there are also many other ways materials can be put. I ask: Is there an absolute way to order certain material next to each other?”
Ashkan Layegh
Ashkan Layegh is an Iranian composer, improviser, multi-instrumentalist and visual artist currently based in London. Ashkan’s practice incorporates a multifaceted artistic outlook that examines the perception of structure, variation, and affordability within musical material. Ashkan’s music has been performed by his own ensembles, including the Phemo Quartet, at such venues as Kings Place, Southbank Centre, and Wigmore Hall, as well as by the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, Riot Ensemble, Septura Brass, CHROMA Ensemble, and Temporal Harmonies, Inc. His recent work includes Ephemerality and Recurrence (London Sinfonietta and Phemo Quartet), quasi-improvisatory album Penumbra with Sam Norris, and audiovisual collaboration Carnamortal or; The Flesh In-Between. Ashkan is a current PhD candidate at the Royal Academy of Music, where he gained his Master’s degree as composer and Bachelor’s degree as a pianist — the first Iranian to do so since the 1979 Revolution.
Ashkan’s Ephemerality and Recurrence, developed as part of the London Sinfonietta’s Writing the Future programme 2024-25, was premiered at the Southbank Centre on 20th November 2025, as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival. Following the premiere, Finn Mattingly spoke with Ashkan to discuss self-reflexivity, frames, collective memory-making, and more…
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Finn/PRXLUDES: Ashkan, let’s start with the basics — what is your musical background?
Ashkan Layegh: If you want me to go to the very, very beginning: my dad is quite a prominent composer and Persian classical musician back in Iran. So that was the music I grew up with. I started playing the piano at the age of five, but didn’t really take it seriously. And when I was 13, I started to get into progressive rock. So with certain difficulties, I finally bought an electric guitar. And you probably know, in Iran, it’s illegal — rock music is basically considered to be against the Islamic regime. So there was not that much of a chance to perform.
But I did study quite a bit of repertoire; I was playing the piano, but it wasn’t that extreme. By the age of 17, I got a bit more serious in playing the piano, but I was immediately all-in the composition realm. I was composing things all the time just for myself, as I never had an ensemble back in Iran, and there never was a huge possibility to collaborate. I already knew very clearly that I was not going to end up as a full-time musician in Iran, because music is not considered a proper job — so you had to do something else. I studied mathematics in high school, and where I gained some first ranks in the country as well. Then I got accepted into an architecture school at University of Tehran; I studied architecture for two years, which formed a big part of my interest in various different types of arts, from cinema to painting to sculpture in addition to architecture.
While I was doing that, I won the Barbad Piano Competition where the jury — Layla Ramezan and Christophe Bukudjian — came from France to Iran. And through that, I got connected to a British conductor, Mark Stephenson, who was organising a concert for the Persian New Year in London. After doing that concert, he called my dad and said, “I think your son should study music, not architecture”. So that was the point that things changed. Although my parents did believe in me, we never thought there would be a chance for me to actually do an audition for one of the major conservatories before that competition.
Where did your interest in composition start, and what artistic activities led you to ultimately pursue composition at the Royal Academy of Music?
I auditioned on piano, because back then I was not that confident in composition. But when I got into the course, there was quite a lot of confusion: my piano teacher, Joanna MacGregor — who is also the head of piano at Royal Academy of Music — told me in the very first two weeks of the course that if I wanted to go and study composition, I should simply have done that. But I didn’t — and I’m actually pretty glad I didn’t. But I did attend pretty much all the composition courses that were going on at the Academy. I had a few one-to-one lessons, but I went to all the orchestration and techniques classes.
Gradually, I started my own ensembles with the people that I knew. Back then, it was mainly with people from the jazz departments; people who could not only read very detailed music, but could also improvise. By the end of my second year undergrad, I was fully convinced that I wanted to study composition, and did not want to be a classical pianist. Luckily, I was studying with Joanna and she was extremely open about this. She did let me compose, and I ended up being able to perform my music with my own ensembles with lengthy improvisations in classical chamber music exams. I also wrote my own concerto — Concerto for Two Pianos and Drums — for my concerto exam back then.
In my 4th year bachelor’s, I started to consider myself more as a composer than a pianist, and I applied for postgrad composition at RAM and I got in with a full scholarship. I’m now doing my PhD — and the rest is history.
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Tell me a bit about how your interests in architecture, structure, and cinema intertwine with music. Are these separate artistic endeavours or do you see them as a mutual form of expression?
I think I need to give a bit of context about my music as well. I studied architecture, but even prior to that, I was deeply into structure. I’ve been fascinated by numbers since I was a child — I was always into figuring out algorithms for certain things, and trying to realise them, of course. This was way before I was even introduced to algorithmic music; and architecture definitely made me even more obsessed with that idea.
Gradually as I went forward in my music, I was leaning towards a side that I was quite obsessed with: showing how the structure works in a piece of music, and seeing how much I can get away from any sort of text-based narrative — with the goal to create structures that are purely based in sound.
I am also deeply into image-based cinema. In the first year of my Masters, I had a chance to see Peter Greenaway in person. Greenaway has been possibly the most progressive British director in the past 50 years, and he collaborated extensively with Michael Nyman, and also Brian Eno, but they were part of a much bigger circle in 70s and 80s — which also included UK’s experimental/free improvised scene — who were deeply obsessed with John Cage and his notions of cataloguing, framing and made-up systems: in fact, Greenaway made quite an important documentary on Cage, and Nyman wrote the book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond.
Greenaway is essentially a person who is deeply obsessed with these kinds of made-up systems, and he designed his movies based on universal structures like alphabets and number systems. This was something really fascinating for me, because it was not just merely a personal obsession for him; it was very much about articulating his notions about system and structure, and exposing it to the spectator who was watching the film.
Interesting — in what ways do Greenaway’s cinematic structures influence your compositional thinking?
There’s this film called Drowning by Numbers, where there are three ladies — a grandmother, her daughter, and her niece. They drown their husbands in three different stages of the film. And in order to cover up their crimes, they ask this coroner, and the coroner agrees to do so only if they fulfill his sexual demands. But not only do his carnal desires go unsatisfied, they eventually drown him as well. The coroner’s son plays these weird games with number counting and death. He goes out and counts different dead creatures and objects and labels them; and from the very beginning of the movie to the very end, you see number one to hundred successively. So when you see 50, you’re right in the middle of the film — when you see 75, you’re about three-quarters in… It’s a really weird movie, but it was that kind of exploration in which the audience actually realises how the structure is working. They become well-aware of the artificiality of the product — and this is also important, because Greenaway is very much against the kind of realist tradition that’s very well supported in this country.
What I find especially interesting is that rather than asking Nyman to compose the music for him after making the film first, they discussed structures with each other. So in the case of this film, they discussed Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, and then started to analyse different elements of the entire piece, for instance all the ornamentations. So you hear the first piece at the very beginning of the movie, in which you hear all the ornaments of the second movement of the Mozart repeated three times each in relation to the three main protagonists of the film. These kinds of structures meant that the film was essentially a medium that is working on itself, and the music is a distinct medium that’s working on itself — and the combination of the two in parallel was something very important for me.
This got me thinking about my own background of studying architecture, and how I can put all of these elements into what I’m doing as a musician. So it did certainly help me articulate what I’m going to do, but it also helped me clarify that the structures I’m specifically interested in are self-reflexive structures.
What do you mean by self-reflexive structures, and what do those look like in your music?
There’s not much written on self-reflexivity in music. It’s been mainly in postmodern literature and cinema. It’s very much about when something becomes aware of its own nature. Let’s say for instance in cinema, when an actor acknowledges their fictionality and breaks the fourth wall. They turn around, they look at the camera and they acknowledge that what you’re watching is an artificial product. This is a very basic form of self-reflexivity in cinema.
But self-reflexivity could get to a point where a piece of art can become its own critic and is constantly reflecting itself. It can tell you that it can be made in this way or that way, and illuminates different aspects of the perception of itself. The reason I’m using the word “critic” is that it actually reviews itself; it gives different angles of its own self as it goes through. So rather than giving one “narrative” (if you want to call it that) — outlining A, B, C, D, and nothing more — it questions the order and tries to exhibit why A comes before B, and why C specifically comes after B. It constantly asks the question, “is there another way to organise this?”, so that the piece somehow explores different opportunities that it could have. It offers a small fraction of possibilities and the ways they can be put together and exposed to the spectator. So by the time the piece is finished, it is somehow in denial of what is in order to give itself to you. Quite often when I go to concerts, I do think about the fact that as composers, we choose to put certain things next to each other, but there are also many other ways materials can be put. I ask: Is there an absolute way to order certain material next to each other?
I gradually started to notice this in my own work as a composer. I was quite constantly juxtaposing things together and reordering material to find which order is best — and the eventual conclusion was that none of them are actually better than any other: they just have different qualities and present different elements of themselves. So if I can have a piece of music that can represent some of the possibilities, maybe then I can give a chance to my spectator listeners to choose whatever thing they want to choose themselves; whatever possibility that they want to create themselves. It’s about creating this small sort of encyclopedias that tell you what is possible to do. But they don’t give you the complete possibilities: they’re rather fake encyclopedias. This is the ironic part of the subject!
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It seems that improvisation is also a big part of your artistic practice. I can kind of see this correlation between improvisation and these self-reflexive structures that enable themselves to be modified, and allow themselves to provide their own reflective lens as analysed by an audience in real time… How does this concept intersect with your improvisation practices?
I’ve grown up as a Persian classical musician, and I studied Setar. To me, that style of music is in my DNA, as well as progressive rock — these are the two musics that I’ve grown up with in great detail. And the thing about Persian classical music is that it has an extremely encyclopaedic nature: there are great sets of patterns, ornaments and systems through which the music is organised. But the way the improvisation happens is very much about how each person manipulates these detailed elements. So the structure is very-well defined, but it offers an extensive space for different readings and subjective interpretations. This kind of live-action interplay through a highly-detailed system is essentially the very basis of my practice.
But then when I came to London, I got deeply into free jazz and free improvisation. This is something I do day to day, and I have few colleagues with whom I improvise on a regular basis. With Sam Norris — who is possibly my closest collaborator — We noticed something very interesting happening in our playing together. I don’t necessarily know what he’s going to give me, and I know he doesn’t necessarily know what I’m going to give him. There was a certain point of disconnection between both of us. There’s this dialectical procedure that’s happening in real time, in which there’s these two forces that are quite against each other. As they go through, they might gradually come together or they might never come together, but to acknowledge that there is a wide range of possibilities — that there’s not “one” way to react to something, there are rather too many different ways — brings us to the notions of dissociation in free improvisation which is something that we have been trying to articulate in the past four years.
How does this practice then shape your compositional approach?
Through those experiences with Sam, my compositional practice started to get questioned. I thought: okay, there’s not only one truth about one specific material — there are different sides of it. In composition, the question for me is how I can create systems that could explore certain sets of possibilities, and this a concept which is deeply tied to the dissociative nature of free improvisation.
On the other hand, as an avid listener of free improvised music, you gradually get to know the characteristics of each musician. For instance, when you listen to someone like Evan Parker — who is known for his auditory streamings — you see how this is coming through in his playing with other musicians. However those people are different and often have their own characteristics, thus there is this zone of possibilities for a great variety of music to come out. As a listener you witness these characters collide with each other, and this collision for me sparked the idea of systematic juxtaposition and permutation — which is a fundamental element of my compositional practice.
Furthermore, in my music, I essentially work with frames. The reason I do that is related to the artificiality that I’m deeply interested in. I think the whole act of going to concerts is quite an artificial thing. I mean, when you think of it, you go, you sit down, and you dedicate this amount of time — or some frame of time — to listen to something that’s going on.
When you say “frame”, do you mean a movie frame, like a snapshot of sorts — or more of a picture frame that shapes a perspective of the artwork?
It relates to those points as well. But to clarify, the whole idea of concert music as we know today is very much a Western thing. You might find that the first concert halls in somewhere like Iran were made less than 100 years ago. And if I’m right, in Southeast Asia, it’s about 150 years. So the concept of actually going to concerts is very much a westernised thing. When we go into a concert, when we witness something, we’re somehow dedicating some time. So the time itself is a frame. But then, yes, you’re right: the fact that we’re seeing people on stages is a frame. And this also relates to notions of frame in cinema. Greenaway often talks about frame as artificiality number one: there is no such thing as frame in nature — we do not see one another in frames — so frame itself is an artificial element.
I often like to acknowledge that by injecting improvisatory spirit into my music, such that as an audience, you might think that what you’re hearing is a product of a real improvisation. I emphasise this because I think improvisation is one of the very few forms in which the spectator actually witnesses some sort of creation in front of their eyes. Of course, people that are playing that music come with their own performance practices and personal backgrounds — but they come together and they’re making something as you witness it being made there, in the moment. I would like to inject that kind of spirit into my work as much as I can; but then suddenly cut it and move it to something else, which might have very little relation to that. That “pulling the audience back” is sort of acknowledging the artificial element there.
So for me, the frame is obviously a fundamental thing that ties in deeply with improvisation. The type of improvisation that I’m interested in is quite a chaotic one, and I’m interested to see how, with certain reductionist systems, I can create certain levels of encyclopaedic chaos. But as the amount of material that I’m presenting is often quite limited, it acknowledges the limits of a frame and its failure to be encyclopaedic. So it’s rather about creating a fake encyclopedia. I do this quite often with multi-gestural spaces — because the common idiomatic idea of improvisation that we all have in mind is a proliferation of loads of gestures that try to go completely against memory. This is also deeply related to Second Viennese School and post-war music. But today, when writing music, of course I can employ infinite systems — but the essential fact that the music ends eventually means that you as a composer can’t represent all the possibilities that exist. So you end up with frames regardless.
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I want to ask you about your album, Penumbra. You write that “the album explores the notions of collective memory formation” as you and your collaborator, Sam Norris, question the real-time twofoldness of the compositional and improvisational processes. What do you mean by “collective memory”? Does it exist amongst the performers, audience, or the collective between these two bodies?
Well, I think presence in general is memory. We come with a certain baggage of data, and we’re present there — and whether making something or not, we are contributing to some sort of memory — whether it’s our own memory or that of a bigger group. It again relates to the concept of frames. What we’re deeply interested in is the relation between music and memory itself. When we talk about self-reflexive structures, those structures only become self-reflexive when the memory is activated; or when you think, “okay, I’m hearing this now, and I’m hearing this” as you hear the juxtaposition of elements.
I think the act of remembering something is deeply neglected in most idiomatic free jazz and free improvisation music. I understand why the idea of challenging memory was in fashion at a certain point, but for me I think there’s not much to get out of it. We have memory: it’s us. We are there witnessing.
So the collective memory formation was very much about how the dialogue between me and Sam — with all its dissociations — creates musical structures that gain some sort of distinctness for themselves, as we’re trying to make something that we can maybe recall later. This relates to repetition as well; but it’s very much about certain consistent physical activity that happens across a frame of time. Because Sam can play certain gestures, I can aim to play the same gestures too — and we can imply to our listener that a section is generally composed of these specific gestures. But It’s not necessarily about pinpointing something specific, though; what you’re pinpointing is some level of consistent physical activity rather than a specific set of gestures. In contrast, you might also have a section in which you play highly intricate yet stabled patterns, and explore the gradual interplay within those patterns. It’s interesting to see how you contribute to memory there, because your audience obviously understands that what they’re hearing is something really solid — but they are also aware the product they’re hearing is coming out of improvisation.
Going back to the relation between improvisation, composition, and memory formation… In composition, in the majority of cases, it is a given fact that the composers have to be super articulate about what they want to say. The common perception we have of them is that they normally won’t be testing things in front of their audience, as free improvisers might experiment with their ideas. This dichotomy and contrast was essentially what me and Sam wanted to maximise but also dismantle: to make composition and improvisation doppelgängers.
You recently produced an audiovisual work, Carnamortal or; the Flesh In-Between — where does that title come from? What was the process like in creating this audiovisual work?
Carnamortal, or; the Flesh In-Between is a collaborative multimedia production that explores syntactical duplexity between manipulating image and sound through time and space; not as momentary synchronisations — to visualise sound or musicalise image — but as a doppelgänger audiovisual experience.
This project was an exploration of a mutual syntax between the music and the screen material. Both products can be completely independent from each other, but also completely related to each other. [It’s] a multi-layered title that received quite a variety of interpretations, some of very bizarre: “Carnamortal” is a made-up name, that is coming from “carnal” as in carnal desires — sex as means of reproduction and very the beginning of life — and “mortal” as in death — the very end. “The flesh in-between” refers to the act of owning a human body, a collective experience that lies between sex and death.
So the project was an exploration of corporeality in a different sense. The screen material was a collaboration between myself as the director and editor, Harvey Cullis — who was doing the raw visuals and cinematography — and Amirhossein Asadi who was doing the illustrations. The illustrations were basically three things: a male body, female body, and skeleton. We aimed to present a wide range of ideas, one of which was the consistent failure of power structures in cataloguing our subjective and collective morality — very specifically sexuality, race and gender. We had different permutations of upper body, lower body, and head rolling on each other. So you get many different combinations of different human bodies. Then, we have representation of sex, as well as human decay portrayed across the faces and bodies. Essentially, it was about the idea of viscerality— the corporeal essence of life, and not eroticism.
On the stage, there’s a quartet of two drum kits, a microtonal guitar and alto saxophone, and on the screen there’s a quartet of visuals, illustrations, anecdotes and process notes. The reason for having two drum kits was a self-reflexive acknowledgment of the corporeality of the performance: for me, the drum kit is possibly the most visceral instrument of all, since every part of the human body is completely involved in the performance.
The structure of the piece was based on a made-up relation between the number of performers and instruments on stage. We have three instruments (drum kit, microtonal electric guitar, and alto saxophone) and four musicians (Luke Brueck Seeley, Harry Ling, Sam Norris and myself), so 12 became a fundamental number for the piece. We had 12 distinct sections, 12-tone rows, and in the very beginning of the piece we have a multi-gestural section where everyone is playing 12 different gestures that never meet at the same time — while on the screen we have 12 different frames where in each we have 12 different materials (in terms of illustrations, we have exactly 12 different heads, upper and lower bodies) that are never synced together.
The project was essentially, again, about self-reflexivity. Eventually, the work gets to a point that you don’t really know what’s going to come next — but by this point, you’ve heard all the material before. So by halfway through the piece, you’ve heard everything that you need to hear, but still you don’t know what’s exactly going to come up. We were simply trying to express and articulate different qualities of each juxtaposition on the screen and on the stage — and rejecting any kind of absolute truth within each juxtaposition.
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Learn more about Ashkan Layegh and his practice:
- https://ashkanlayegh.com/
- https://www.instagram.com/ashkan.layegh/
- https://soundcloud.com/ashkan-layegh
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCawsfp4jpjE7fLypfnz4rEg
References/Links:
- Mark Brown, ‘Film director Peter Greenaway calls for ‘image-based cinema” (2016), The Guardian
- Peter Greenaway, Four American Composers, Part One: John Cage (1983)
- Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 1999)
- Drowning by Numbers (1988), dir. Peter Greenaway
- Mozart – Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat major, K. 364 (1779)
