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.

Khatchadour Khatchadourian is a Lebanese-Armenian vocalist and duduk player based in the Bay Area. Growing up within the Armenian diaspora in Lebanon and Aleppo, Syria, Khatchadour’s voice pays homage to the vocal landscapes 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.

On the opening night of this year’s Other Minds Festival, Khatchadourian will be performing with Ensemble Decipher in the world premiere of Bohigian’s I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment, a symbolic biography of the Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov told through the multilingual poetry of Sayat-Nova. On this episode, guest host Devin King interviews Khatchadouian and Bohigian about the project.

Music: Scenes 7, 1, 8, and 5 from I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment by Joseph Bohigian, performed by Khatchadour Khatchadourian and Ensemble Decipher

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This episode of the Other Minds Podcast was hosted by Devin King and edited by Joseph Bohigian. Outro music is “Kings: Atahualpa” by Brian Baumbusch (Other Minds Records).