Tongue of the Hidden’ is a film by Bafta award winning director David Anderson based on a book that contains ten love poems from the collected works, or Divan of Hafez, the fourteenth-century Persian metaphysical poet from Shiraz, whose work is accepted as expressing some of the central ideas of Sufism , the spiritual aspect of Islam. The whole Persian text of each poem has been designed in the shape of an animal mentioned by Hafez in the text, and set alongside a modern English translation by the artist herself.

My role in the project was to record the music of the Iranian lute player Anoosh Jahanshahl (for which we recorded 4 tracks) and then use these to create the soundtrack for the film. This was an organic process that, unusual for an animation, didn’t start with a rigid soundtrack, but evolved as the animator, Florian Guibert, tried out new ideas and directions.

The film was premiered at the London Film Festival 2007 and went on to be shown a number of times on Channel 4 as part of the Animate Season. You can hear a complete collection of the music recorded for this project here.