Name: Simin Stine Ramezanali aka abji_hypersun
Nationality: Iranian-Danish
Occupation: Composer, drummer, sound artist, visual artist
Current release: abji_hypersun is one of the artists featured on Intended Consequence, an expansive compilation "representing a fresh lineup of Iranian women musicians and producers from across the electronic music spectrum."
Recommendations: I recommend reading this text: “On a lesbian relationship with music – a serious effort not to think straight” by Suzanne G. Cusik. It’s super funny and smart – it’s some years since I read it and I remember noticing a change on how I thought about my private relationship to music.
And I recommend this album Archeophony (Akudi1027) by Raed Yassin, because I never got tired of it, I can’t name you any track title even though I listened to it a lot – I think there is a reason for that, it just makes me drift away.
I know you said two, but I also recommend looking at Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings if you need a good laugh.

If you enjoyed this abji_hypersun interview and would like to stay up to date with her music, visit her on Instagram, and Soundcloud.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

It really depends for me in which situation I listen. Am I at a live show? Do I listen at home, do I listen to music to give feedback for a friend?

I also write reviews on music and I noticed how much more focused my listening got after I started writing these reviews for actual readers, not just in the notes of my phone. It’s like I’m learning so much because I get “forced” to listen in different spans of time: here in the now, what actually happens in the music? What decisions where taken technically and aesthetically, how does it make me feel in my body?

In a way I also try to listen to the past – where do these references come from, I filter it through my own back catalogue of listening – maybe I need to do some research which then takes me somewhere completely different and again changes my listening experience – I listen to the future because I’m also listening to something new, trying to image how this would impact the music that is coming in the future.

This is a more analytical way of listening which is very interesting to me right now, but listening to music is for me always highly affective and in a way uncontrollable, which is what I love about sound / music – I never know where it takes me. I listen to a track and all of a sudden, I am overwhelmed with the memory of the stingy, way too sweet, synthetic floral smell of the spray deo I used when I was 13 and was just introduced to this Danish noise rock band (Under Byen) that became super formative in my journey into music. It still is.



I love listening with my eyes closed.

What were your very first steps in music like and how would you rate the gains made through experience - can one train/learn being an artist?

My first steps took place very early, I was exposed to a lot of music as a child: jazz, Persian classical music, rock, r’n’b, reggae, Tehrangeles-pop, percussion - you name it. There was always a selected album playing or the sound of the radio or tv.

Growing up with a mother who played music in different contexts as a music teacher for kids and as a hobby – she had her band “Kvinde Bandet” which translates into “Women's Band” rehearsing in our basement every weekend, with some of her friends. They played covers of their favorite songs – from the top of my head the song I remember most clearly was “More than words” by Extreme which she sang in beautiful vocal harmonies with two of her friends. It’s such a camp song, but still every time I hear this song somewhere, I get so emotional and tear up a bit.



Later she started drumming. I think this is where I really fell in love with the sound of the drumkit and started playing it at home. Shortly after, when I was 8 years old, I started having classes, too, and that’s how this life-long complicated love-relationship with the drums and beats, percussion in general started.

I think one can train being an artist, for sure! I believe all of us carry something highly precious inside that could get transformed into art, if one has the will and drive – more importantly, the right circumstances and support to do it. I definitely had that growing up.

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music mean to you at that age and what’s changed since then?

I think it still means the same to me, it’s the love of my life – pretty simple and clear, pretty complicated. It took some time to realize but it is and probably will always be.

I guess what has changed most drastically is that I have professionalized my hobby, and in that way, there are more layers and sometimes obstacles that occur, also things that become a part of my relationship to music that I didn’t have to worry about at age 13-16. Like the precarious working conditions in the music industry, money, connections, and exposure – the list is long.

But generally, my relationship to music just gets more and more exciting to me, deeper, less insecure and filled with gratitude to have the privileges to actually fill my life with music and have the circumstances (even though sometimes precarious), drive and skill to have an input and output in my life like music.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and what motivates you to create?

I want to be a free nerd! Personally, it motivates to keep challenging my insecurities, kick them in the ass and create from the freest, most desire filled space I am able to create for myself, and my fellow musicians.

I want to treasure the tradition and cultural history of music being a great carrier of feelings and emotions, describing and opening up the things that are impossible to understand or communicate with the limits of language. This is how I want to communicate and some of my deepest friendships, most beautiful collective expiriences and human relations have started and keep deepening through either listening together or playing together.

This is what motivates me, and it feels like it’s one of my most precious tasks in this life. It’s a very humbling feeling.

To quote a question by the great Bruce Duffie: When you come up with a musical idea, have you created the idea or have you discovered the idea?

Haha, I search in the big pool of the unknown (and know) influences and from there I create. Sometimes it’s very conceptual, but mostly more intuitive. The concept comes to me a bit later – it feels like a fly swatter hitting me in the back of my head, and then I’m like “ahh, this is what I was doing”, “now it all makes sense” and mostly “oh hey big question - it’s you again”. It’s an exercise in trust and patience.

I’m employing myself and trusting the boss to have the general responsibility (the boss being my unconsciousness) and I guess that’s somewhere in between creating and discovering.

Paul Simon said “the way that I listen to my own records is not for the chords or the lyrics - my first impression is of the overall sound.” What's your own take on that and how would you define your personal sound?

I vibe with that, I very seldomly think of chord-progressions, whether the kick is on 1 or 2, or how lyrics are built up, it’s more an intuitive process.

My personal sound is operatic, at times harsh, out-of-tune, rhythm based, intimate, cringe, contains tropes, at times it’s absurd. It’s humorous, creepy and highly intelligent in its stupidity.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

Of course, the ocean gets me every time, especially on its wild days. But also the echo of the mountains, the reverb in a devotional space, the wind carrying something, thunder.

Everything that makes me feel small moves me.

A teacher that influenced me a lot once said to me that they don’t really differentiate between music and sound. It inspired me a lot and I sort of took it on to become my own way of understanding and listening in a more non-hierarchical way. Thinking of the hierarchies of sound is super interesting to me – why is something considered “good music”, what field recordings are considered “sophisticated”? Of course there are hierarchies as there sadly are in everything, but we can take it upon us to try to deconstruct them.

To me, experiencing sound and music became so much more interesting, beautiful, and moving when I decided that both things are the same and equal in value – LIFE, the musical.

From very deep/high/loud/quiet sounds to very long/short/simple/complex compositions - are there extremes in music you feel drawn to and what response do they elicit?

I like and hunt sounds that are harsh, hard, scary, monumental, dark and noisy and on the other end of the spectrum vulnerable, soft, “beautiful” -  whatever that means. It’s so subjective and without wanting to, I just made this binary / division that I don’t think is interesting.

I like a combination of sounds, or a composition you could say, that feels like, sounds like or reminds me of the moment or space in between laughing and crying. When laughing becomes crying or the other way around. Something in between nightmare and dream.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your pieces, live performances or albums that's particularly dear to you, please?

When I play solo as abji_hypersun my process is much about sampling, layering and beats. I use a lot of field recordings, they often have some kind of an affectional value to me, and many of them stick around and are being used in many different contexts, could be as an underlying layer in a track or later being chopped up and used in a beat. I build beats and there is often some sort of storytelling going on, whether it’s in the composition or the lyrics.

It's hard to choose an example because I feel like my creative process is never completely the same. But the song “omen indeed,” which I released some months ago, could be an example of this recycling I was talking about.

Every time I play live, I play it in a new way, sometimes it even feels like it’s the only song I ever made. I was ambivalent feeling to bounce it out and look at it as this linear progression with a beginning and an end – deciding that “now it’s done”. It’s a song about magical thinking and love and the hook is more like a chant or a sample traveling through different eras in time for me.

I like this thought about the non-linear, I like to keep it open. Releasing many different versions of tracks could be fun, but probably mostly for me.

Do you conduct “experiments” or make use of scientific insights when you're making music?

I would say I do experiment to some degree – and make use of insights but I don’t think I could prove any of them scientifically.

How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

Music is the soundtrack to my life, and I’m lucky to play both alone – sometimes in collaborations with my solo project abji_hypersun and in my band SLIm0 with my beloved friends. So I feel like I get to experience music in many different ways.



When I write about it, it makes me reflect and listen. When I create I get an output for the feelings it gives me to be alive. When I play with others I even get to talk to humans beyond language. So I would say yes, there are so many things to learn from listening and understanding music, we can learn so much about life by letting ourselves be affected by music, emotionally or by being inspired.

I also think its really helpful and trains the empathetic nerve – gets us closer to other people. It can gather people, it can incite and hype people, which can be extremely useful if you want to start a revolution. It can carry grief in mourning like nothing else. It can also push you to go to the really dark and scary places and look for what is hiding in there – then again, it can also be the hand that helps you out of the darkness again.

Music that is complex and genre hybrids challenge me to think in more complex, nuanced and less binary ways about life, which I think is so beautiful and highly necessary in this world.

Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

When I make music, I can be much more complex and layered in my expression than when I make a cup of coffee.

Let’s say I made a track about love – which is such a big feeling or concept, completely ungraspable but so easy to feel. In my composition I can try to bring in and translate all the nuances into sound and make a complicated affective multifaceted composition. There will also, for me at least, always be these things I can’t control that end up exposing me (the musician) a bit, whether it be me reaching the limit of my skills, from where I have to be creative or you know ...

Especially with lyrics I feel like I’m also exposing my way of looking at the world or life. I don’t feel so exposed when I make coffee, it’s not risky in the same way ... I mean of course I can burn myself but not in the same way I can burn myself on music.

A cup of coffee lasts maybe 10 minutes. A good song lasts forever.

Every time I listen to "Albedo 0.39" by Vangelis, I choke up. But the lyrics are made up of nothing but numbers and values. Do you, too, have a song or piece of music that affects you in a way that you can't explain?

A lot of music makes me cry, but usually it doesn’t take me long to figure out why. I very often get moved my music where the lyrics are in a language I don’t understand.

Makes me think that language is also just an instrument.

If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

I would love to see a group of big solo acts and people from various bands forming a new hybrid band, could be for example Rihanna, Goldie, Amy Lee, Kevin Shields and Erykah Badu.

I would also love to see men caring a little bit less about gear ...

I would love all the young people who produce music in secret to feel secure enough to share it, because we are so many out here who can’t wait for it!

What I wish for the most is better working conditions for all musicians around the world. This would also mean open borders so that everyone could go where ever they want to perform, and so we could all get connected easily and collaborate and just live!