Image by Samuel White
Darius Paymai is an Iranian-American composer and performer based in London. His work is characterised by a clarity of approach and economy of material: often fragile, static, cyclical, found and reused in new contexts.
He is undertaking an Artist Master’s at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, learning with Laurence Crane, where he also studied at an undergraduate level with Paul Newland and Paul Whitmarsh.
As a composer he has worked with ensembles such as the London Chamber Orchestra, Plus-Minus Ensemble, Britten Sinfonia, EXAUDI, Quatuor Bozzini, and cellist Francesco Dillon, and his music performed at St. John’s Smith Square, The Place, Milton Court Concert Hall, and Hundred Years Gallery.
As a performer he is interested in approaching experimental repertoire, drone, and free improvisation, often with harmonium, percussion, or live electronics, as well as making and presenting independent radio shows.
His studies have been supported by the Guildhall School Trust.
He enjoys two-word piece titles and crossword puzzles.
link to recent interview
- piano quartet 2021
- violin, viola, ‘cello, piano
- written for The De Kooning Ensemble
This piano quartet was finished just after I completed my undergraduate degree and written for my friends Jess, Freya, Evie, and Lewis.
Programme note
In June 2020 I made a short piece for piano entitled six bars, which is concerned with listening to the full decay of a number of notes and chords. The material in that piece, to some degree, found its way into everything I did for the next year or so.
This piano quartet is about listening to those chords in natural string harmonics both with and without the equally-tempered piano, and about acknowledging the nature of those chords (and the piano itself) as sounds which decay, while allowing the sustaining strings to dialogue with and counterbalance this decay.
This quartet was written concurrently with my recent orchestral piece, dream hollow, and as such they both explore similar pathways — juxtaposition and superposition of simple layers, openness, slowness, breathing, fragility, materiality.
Performances
09-07-2021: The De Kooning Ensemble, All Saints Blackheath (UK)
27-10-2021: The De Kooning Ensemble, St. Mary’s Weymouth (UK)
Video of performance from 27-10-2021