Tune in to this episode of The Radio Art Hour produced by Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow Giulia Palladini!

From the Lips to the Moon live on Debt and Refuge: Disruptive music for broken times, a program curated by Nymity on NTS Radio. This live session was performed and first aired in October 2022, and it features Pouya Ehsaei (live electronics), Tara Fatehi (poetry and vocals), and Adib Rostami (kamanche). Recorded by Nymity.

From the Lips to the Moon is an ongoing project exploring collective multilingual, and multi-instrument live improvisation, created by two London-based, Iranian artists: electronic musician and composer Pouya EsàI Ehsaei and performer-writer Tara Fatehi. The format of this project takes inspiration from an ancient creative tradition originated in Iran, and emerged from the life of migrating nomads travelling across the region: musicians and storytellers moving around and encountering people along the way, playing their instruments for them and telling stories.

From the Lips to the Moon was initially conceived as a radio show on Radio Alhara where Pouya invited international storytellers to recite and he made music for their words. In collaboration with Tara, it became a live show, first presented at Reference Point in London, where each night the two artists started inviting different musicians and poets to enter in a dialogue with their work through collective improvisation. Each time From the Lips to the Moon is different, open to the unexpected, the unpredictable, to polyphony and radical dissonance.

Over the last three years, From the Lips to the Moon has featured over 30 guests artists, and travelled outside of London, encountering new voices, accents, and rhythms. Tara and Pouya built and keep inhabiting a space of creative coexistence, which is plural in its very premise, and it is based on a profound trust in the possibility of reciprocal listening. Because it is only through listening to one other, which any form of tuning in, interrupting, and playing together may possibly take place.

From the Lips to the Moon’s creative proposal suggests, as well, a horizon of political potentiality: I want to describe it by echoing the words of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, still resonating in the territory from where I am speaking: this horizon is the possibility of ‘a world in which many worlds fit’. All worlds, in fact, as long as they have no borders, that no human is illegal in them, that no right can be suspended, that the joy generated in the encounter of collective life is not to be annihilated.

Here is to more spaces for playing dissonance, for amplifying it, so that different rhythms, finally, may possibly emerge. Described by Giulia Palladini, Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow 2025.