Scenes from I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment (A Work-in-Progress)

Other Minds presents scenes in workshop from the work-in-progress, I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment, by American composer Joseph Bohigian, Lebanese-Armenian vocalist Khatchadour Khatchadourian, and the music-technology group Ensemble Decipher. The free workshop performance will take place on Friday, July 25, 2025, at 7:30 pm at the Paul Dresher Ensemble Studio in Oakland, CA. The performance will be followed by a panel discussion and audience Q&A with the ensemble, moderated by Charles Amirkhanian.

I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment is an evening-length multimedia work for live electronics, solo voice, and video projection about the life of Georgian-born Soviet-Armenian film director Sergei Parajanov. Though he made significant contributions to film, Parajanov was repeatedly persecuted, censored, and imprisoned in his home country. The multiculturalism of his native South Caucasus region was essential to his work, which is reflected in the multilingual text for the piece by the 18th century bard Sayat Nova. The work combines Sayat Nova’s existing melodies with newly created ones by Khatchadourian and Bohigian, along with music by folk musicians from across the South Caucasus. The world premiere will take place in 2026 at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco.

Ensemble Decipher has been performing with vintage, contemporary, and emerging technologies since 2017. I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment is the latest project in a long history of collaboration with Bohigian, also a member of the ensemble, as a composer, whose music focuses on memory, cultural reunification, and diaspora through the use of archival materials. This piece marks the first collaboration between Ensemble Decipher and Khatchadour Khatchadourian, an expert singer of traditional music from across West Asia in Armenian, Arabic, and Farsi.

This performance is funded in part by a grant from the MAP Fund. Seating is limited, please register for free at the link above.

Joseph Bohigian is a composer and performer of acoustic and electronic music. His work focuses on issues of memory, cultural reunification, and diaspora. With a strong interest in reestablishing a relationship with lost elements of our past to better envision our future, he makes use of archival materials in his music, such as sound recordings, interviews, and written texts, synthesizing fragments of song lyrics and reviving ancient musical notations. Bohigian’s music has been performed at the International Computer Music Conference (Limerick, Ireland), Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles), TENOR Conference (Melbourne), Suoni Per Il Popolo (Montreal), New Music Gathering, and Aram Khachaturian Museum Hall (Yerevan) by the Mivos Quartet, Decibel, Great Noise Ensemble, Argus Quartet, and Playground Ensemble. He performs as a founding member of Ensemble Decipher, a group dedicated to working with vintage, contemporary, and emerging technologies, and produces broadcasts of contemporary music for Music from Other Minds on KALW in San Francisco and interviews with composers on the Other Minds Podcast and the music/technology-focused series Decipher This!. Bohigian holds a PhD and MA in composition from Stony Brook University and a BA from California State University Fresno.

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Khatchadour Khatchadourian is a Lebanese-Armenian vocalist and duduk player based in the Bay Area. His vocal repertoire is grounded in the Armenian and Levantine Arabic vocal traditions. Growing up within the Armenian diaspora on the Lebanese Mediterranean coast, and later having spent many years in Aleppo, Syria, Khatchadour’s voice pays homage to the vocal landscapes spanning the regions of the South Caucasus, Levant, and Anatolia. Khatchadour’s passion for the duduk, an Armenian double reed woodwind, began in 2007, and has since taken him on musical journeys across Armenia and Southern France. He studies under master duduk player Levon Minassian. Additionally, for the past few years, Khatchadour has immersed himself in the study of Persian vocal Radif, and sings in Farsi under the instruction of master vocalist Mahsa Vahdat. Khatchadour is currently completing his sixth album, Shounch: Breath.

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Ensemble Decipher is a modular, experimental music group that performs with vintage, contemporary, and emerging technologies. Founded in 2017 by Niloufar Nourbakhsh, the ensemble strives to redefine performer virtuosity by drawing on the technological advancements of our time to highlight new voices and ways of listening. Ensemble Decipher seeks to reflect on and challenge the power structures that lace the field of electronic music by reexamining technology’s role in their performance practice. Recent works commissioned by the group have mobilized network technologies, amplified gardening, machine learning, kinetic sculptures, acoustic instruments, and laptops. Ensemble Decipher consists of Joseph Bohigian, Robert Cosgrove, Eric Lemmon, Chelsea Loew, Taylor Long, and Niloufar Nourbakhsh.

Ensemble Decipher has collaborated with composers and technologists including Bora Yoon, Mari Kimura, Margaret Schedel, Daria Semegen, Erin Rogers, Jose Tomás Henriques, Mara Helmuth, Yaz Lancaster, Paul Leary, Lyn Goeringer, and Lainie Fefferman and premiered works by many others. Recent feature performances include concerts at the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, International Computer Music Conference, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Roulette Intermedium, Rhizome DC, New Music Gathering, and an ensemble residency at the New Music for Strings Festival in Denmark. Decipher has been in residence at Peabody Institute, Michigan State University, Stony Brook University, and the National Philharmonic Orchestra Summer String Institute. Their work has been supported by the MAP Fund, New Music USA, American Composers Forum, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Alice M. Ditson Fund, Amphion Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Chamber Music America.

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