گاهی، نگاهی

Ignite Me – اوپرای مرا دریاب

Migrant Cloud- Tracks 4 & 8

5:53 | Turbulent throughout | Heavy bass, cello-heavy outro, fading piano arpeggios | E major

October 2021. I stumbled on a photography of the moon on a half-cloudy night. It was the eye of the sky, swollen from weeping, surrounded by clouds pregnant with tears. The poem emerged: A wounded soul, still in pain, seeking remedy from migrant clouds.

This poem was also the subject of my first AI music collaboration, initially arranged as a psychedelic-electronic rock song. Eight months of experimentation gave us the Ignite Me, both origin point and emotional climax of this album.

Ignite Me is the album’s most emotionally raw composition, a cry from the depths. The speaker does not merely seek; the speaker is the wound, is the failing light, pleading for re-ignition after a thousand years of extinction.

The poem opens with devastating self-identification: This cold dim light, it is me, A fire temple without fuel, filled with smoke and molten ash, a thousand years extinguished. The ātashkade (fire temple) is the sacred space of Zoroastrian worship where the eternal flame must never die. To be a fire temple without heīme (logs) is to be a vessel that cannot fulfill its sacred function. Yet even after a millennium: (Left behind in the warm imagination of a flame), the fire temple remembers and yearns for how the fire felt like. The second verse suggests a wounded soul that seeks (from the migrant cloud, remedy/antidote), not rain, but transformation.

The bridge poses the composition’s most plaintive question: (Where are my stars?). Then: (This soft ash, the deathbed of which heartbeat, which love, which fire?). The extinction is so complete that even the memory of what burned has been lost.

The chorus crystallizes the plea: (O eternal love, come and ignite me). The address is to ‘eshq-e azalī, not a human beloved but Love itself, the metaphysical principle preceding creation. The self-description: “man zarre-am va to khorshīd, mara daryāb” (I am a mote and you are the sun, perceive me). The zarre (mote) is fundamental to Persian mystical poetry, a dust speck visible only in sunbeam, entirely dependent on light for existence.

The triple repetition of “mara daryāb” (perceive me) in the outro transforms request into mantra, desperation into meditation. Each iteration intensifies: the first a plea, the second an insistence, the third a final cry. The cello-heavy outro with fading piano arpeggios, the instrument continuing the plea after the voice can no longer sustain it.  

The composition ends not in resolution but in persistence. The fire temple remains standing, waiting for flame that may, “shāyad fardā” (perhaps tomorrow), return.  

The composition employs sustained turbulence, unlike Lighthouse’s dramatic arc, Will You Stay’s plateau, or Mirage’s wave-form, Ignite Me surges and ebbs repeatedly through multiple climactic peaks. Near-constant instability in the melodic lines: wide intervallic leaps, refusal to settle. This is not poor vocal control but musical embodiment of psychic crisis. A soul in pain cannot sing with stability.

This is the track most likely to challenge listeners accustomed to either Persian or Western classical norms, its emotional rawness exceeds the decorum of traditional Persian āvāz although admittedly, its AI-generated vocals lack the human vulnerability of conventional operatic performance. It is, however, the track that most fully realizes the album’s ambition to create something genuinely new.

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I am this cold, dim light
A frozen expectation besieged by winter
A fireless temple filled with smoke and embers
Silent for a thousand years, dreaming of flames and fires

Divine Beloved, Reignite me
I am but a particle, you are the sun
Find me in this cold
Reignite my fire
Reignite my fire
Reignite my fire

I am this wound, overflowing with fragments of soul
Persistent pain, calloused by wrath
Searching for healing
Begging for medicine from passing clouds

Where are my stars?
This soft ash
Is the deathbed of which pulse?
Which love? which fire?

I have poured my rain of tears into the sky's eyes
Upon this cold gaze, wrapped around night's face
Perhaps tomorrow the sky's urgent fever will crack
Downpour and sunlight will merge as one

Divine Beloved, Reignite me
I am but a particle, you are the sun

Find me in this cold
Reignite my fire
Reignite my fire
Reignite my fire

Parsa Mirhaji, April 2025