“The map looks wide, but the choice is never free. Here or there? Or should we have stayed at home, wherever home may be?” Elizabeth Bishop’s questions resonate throughout Iranian composer Ava Rasti‘s latest album, No One Knows How Wild the Wind Blows, a meditation on home, displacement and the peculiar condition of belonging to a place from which one is physically absent.
Landscape has long provided Rasti with a means of exploring memory and its unreliable relationship with geography. Ginestra (2023), conceived in the wake of Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom movement, took its title from Giacomo Leopardi’s poem about a fragile broom flower growing on the volcanic slopes of Vesuvius, its dignity residing not in defiance of nature but in the recognition of its own vulnerability. The River (2024) turned to the Piave, a landscape in Northern Italy bearing the scars of war, where history survives in traces continually rearranged by time and perspective.
Where Leopardi’s flower remains rooted in a landscape destined for destruction, No One Knows How Wild the Wind Blows finds Rasti adrift, caught between the desire to leave and the need to belong. Written between 2024 and 2026 and completed against the backdrop of war in Iran, the album draws its title from a song by Molly Drake, while Forough Farrokhzad’s poetry supplies another image of the wind as an uncontrollable force. The composer, now based in Berlin, finds herself inhabiting two places at once, physically removed from a country whose presence remains inescapable.
The title track opens with plaintive strings, their slowly unfolding lines weighted with longing. Its accompanying video, directed by Aslan Mohammadpour, includes footage of Tehran under bombardment, reinforcing the uneasy distance between the composer’s physical surroundings and the events unfolding at home. “The Wind Will Take Us Away” distils a similar emotional palette, its delicate string writing carrying an undertow of unease. The piece incorporates a recording made in a Freiburg church, where a woman’s voice repeats, “Jesus will take care of us.” Set against Farrokhzad’s evocation of the wind and Rasti’s work on a theatrical adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial, the declaration acquires an unsettling ambiguity, poised somewhere between reassurance and surrender.
The strings and melodic fragments gradually give way to rougher, more abrasive textures on “This Strange Life” and “I Told the Mountain”. “Tehran” opens with a gently repeating figure on muted piano, its rounded, felted notes accompanied by faint mechanical thuds before brighter, cascading phrases emerge. Circular motifs and thickening drones take hold on “I Told the Stones”, while “After You Left” brings back the muffled intimacy of the piano. The closing “The Wind Passes By the Willow Tree” has a mournful quality, as though the music were reluctant to relinquish something already slipping away.
What distinguishes this album from Rasti’s earlier work is its wealth of detail. Where Ginestra was largely concerned with establishing an emotional atmosphere, here the compositions are more intricately articulated, their shifting textures, small interruptions and fleeting melodic gestures introducing greater nuance and ambiguity. Wind, mountains and stones become repositories of memories carried across borders, altered by distance but never entirely erased. If Ginestra contemplated the dignity of remaining rooted in precarious ground, No One Knows How Wild the Wind Blows confronts the possibility that home might no longer be a place one can return to, but something that continues to inhabit us wherever the wind carries us.
photo @Donya Joshani
To follow the flow of the music we reached out directly to Ava Rasti.
There seems to be a fascinating progression in the way you have used landscape across your records. Ginestra takes its name from a flower surviving on the slopes of a volcano; The River considers the Piave as a landscape carrying memories of violence; For Loire emerged from solitude beside another river; and now No One Knows How Wild the Wind Blows revolves around wind, mountains, stones and the search for home.
What draws you repeatedly towards natural phenomena as a way of thinking about human experience? Has their meaning changed as your own relationship with Iran and with the idea of home has changed?
I’ve always been drawn to nature because it allows me to speak about things that are difficult to speak about directly. A landscape can hold memory without explaining anything. A river can carry traces of violence, a flower can survive in a place where it seems it shouldn’t, and the wind can move through a landscape without really belonging to it. They are metaphors for me, but at the same time they are also physical realities, and I think that duality is important to me.
Perhaps with each album, landscape has become less like something I simply observe and more like something I live with internally. In Ginestra, there was this image of a fragile but resilient plant growing on the slopes of a volcano. In The River, the Piave became almost like a witness, carrying the memory of what had happened there. For Loire came from a very particular kind of solitude—being beside the river and allowing that landscape to enter the
music.
With this album, I think the landscape has become even more elemental: wind, stones, mountains. Things that existed long before us and will remain long after us. Maybe that also has something to do with my changing relationship with Iran. When you become distant from a place, your relationship with it slowly becomes less geographical and more internal. You don’t necessarily experience the landscape itself anymore; you carry fragments of it with you. And memory changes geography.
So perhaps I’m not necessarily trying to arrive at a particular definition of “home” through these natural elements. Maybe I’m trying to understand what remains when the idea of home becomes uncertain. You can become distant from a place, or that place can become distant from you, but certain feelings, sounds, images and memories continue to travel with you. In that sense, nature has become a way for me to think about belonging without having to define it too precisely.
The album title comes from Molly Drake’s “How Wild the Wind Blows”, while “The Wind Will Take Us Away” takes us to Forough Farrokhzad. What drew you to these two very different women writers and to their images of the wind? Did you discover any unexpected connection between Drake and Farrokhzad while making the record, or do their words represent different ideas within it?
They are both women poets, but they come from two completely different cultural and historical worlds. That difference is part of what attracted me to them. I wasn’t necessarily looking for a direct connection between Molly Drake and Forough Farrokhzad. Each of them has a very different meaning for me, but somehow they both arrived in this album through the same image: the wind.
It interested me how the wind carries something powerful in the two different lives and cultures of the poets. The wind is something you can’t hold or control, and you don’t really know where it is going to take you. In that sense, it felt very close to some of the ideas that were already present in the album.
Their words don’t necessarily represent the same idea. They come from different places and speak in very different voices. But they somehow found their way into the same world for me, and the wind became a kind of meeting point between them.
Molly Drake’s lyric shows how everything carries something inside it while Forough Farrokhzad reminds us that we will be all carried away. “If we forget, the wind will take us away” The uncertainty as the wind is what I hear in both of them.
“A thought carries a universe
A seed carries a field of grain
Love lies in the arms of change
As a joy carries a pain
And no one knows
How wild the wind blows”
Molly Drake
Elizabeth Bishop’s “Questions of Travel” was another important reference, particularly its uncertainty over whether to leave, remain or return home. The album was written while you were living between countries and completed against the backdrop of war in Iran. How did those experiences alter your understanding of belonging? And when you use the word “home” now, are you thinking primarily about a place, particular people, memory, or something that can travel with you?
Being away while the war was being waged changed my understanding of distance. There is something strange about being far from a place that is still so present inside you. You realize that distance doesn’t make the connection disappear. Sometimes it makes you more aware of it.
That’s why Bishop’s question stayed with me. “The map looks wide, but the choice is never really free: here or there or should”. And yes, sometimes I ask myself whether I should have stayed. I don’t think the album answers that. Like her poem, it doesn’t end with a decision. It learns to live with the question.
“The Wind Will Take Us Away” has an extraordinary constellation of sources: Farrokhzad provides the title, while the piece contains a recording made in an old church in Freiburg during your work on a theatre adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial, with a woman repeating, “Jesus will take care of us.” How did Farrokhzad, Kafka and this accidental declaration of faith come to inhabit the same piece? In an album concerned with forces beyond our control, what did those words mean to you?
In Farrokhzad’s poem, the wind is this force that cannot be controlled. It can be time, death, change, destruction — or simply something larger than us that is already moving. The wind is coming, and we cannot stop it.
Kafka approaches something similar from another direction. In The Trial, the uncontrollable force is the court. Josef K. keeps trying to understand it, to find its logic, to defend himself against it. But the more he tries to grasp it, the more deeply he becomes caught in it. And then, completely accidentally, in this old church in Freiburg, a woman says, “Jesus will take care of us.” At first, I heard it almost as an answer to all of this. But then I started wondering: what if Jesus is not the opposite of the wind? What if Jesus is the wind? What if the thing we cannot control, the thing we cannot see or fully understand, is also the thing we give our faith to? The woman doesn’t explain the unknown. She simply gives it a name: Jesus.
That made the recording very strange and beautiful for me. Kafka gives us the court, Farrokhzad gives us the wind, and this woman gives a name to whatever is beyond our control. They are not necessarily three different things. They might be three ways of encountering the same force.
Maybe Kafka tries to understand it. Maybe Farrokhzad accepts that it will carry us away. And maybe this woman says: I don’t understand it, but I trust it. So when she says, “Jesus will take care of us,” I don’t necessarily hear a promise that we will be protected from what is coming. I hear something more ambiguous: perhaps we are being carried by the very force we are afraid of.
And that brings me back to the question: when we know that everything is temporary, what do we do with life? Maybe we cannot stop the wind. Maybe we cannot understand it. Maybe all we can do is decide how we move within it — whether we resist it, fear it, surrender to it, or trust it.
The video, directed by Aslan Mohammadpour, includes what appears to be footage of the bombing of Tehran seen from a window. Was that footage filmed from your father’s window? If so, who recorded it, and what was it like for you to see those images while you were away from Iran?
No, that specific footage came from Aslan’s window, not my father’s. But the feeling behind your question is very real for me. During the bombing, my brother kept sending me videos, voice messages of drones, and photos. My body was far away, but I felt completely there. Even now, a helicopter in the sky makes me anxious, and I’ve dreamed about those moments many times.
I kept asking myself: how can my mind be somewhere my body isn’t? That’s the double life I’m living, here and there at the same time. I wanted to bring that into my music, because distance doesn’t revoke belonging. It just splits you in two.
(Gianmarco Del Re)
