FVMusicBlog

Photo: FORRM

FORRM on ‘PALAZZO’, Psychedelic Rock and the Creative Freedom Behind Their Music

Blending experimental rock, psychedelia and cinematic soundscapes, FORRM are continually exploring new ways to bring music, art and film together. Their latest release, ‘PALAZZO’, emerged from an impromptu jam session during an exhibition at Palazzo Dandolo in Venice, capturing the spontaneity and raw energy of a band following its creative instincts. Drawing on influences ranging from T. Rex and David Bowie to Television and the Rolling Stones, the track offers a more immediate introduction to their forthcoming concept album, BOUTIQUE.

Led by an international, collaborative approach, FORRM have developed a sound shaped by different places, cultures and artistic disciplines. Their work extends beyond music into contemporary art and filmmaking, with each discipline informing the others. Alongside their experimental approach, they are passionate about artistic independence and finding alternatives to the conventional music industry.

We spoke to FORRM about the story behind ‘PALAZZO’, their creative process, Venice’s influence, the importance of artistic freedom and what comes next.

‘PALAZZO’ is described as experimental rock with a cinematic feel. What inspired the sound of this release, and what did you want listeners to feel when they hear it?

PALAZZO was born out of an impromptu jam session during my exhibition Voyage in Inexistent Lands at Palazzo Dandolo, during the Venice Film Festival in September 2025.

A great riff came out of it, there was an immediate chemistry, and we simply built on that.

We had previously worked on longer, more cinematic compositions, although tracks like ‘JUNKIE WAYZ’ and ‘GALACTICA’ had already paved the way towards something more direct.

This time, we wanted to reconnect with the raw energy of ’70s rock, perhaps something closer to Television. There was definitely some T. Rex in there, some Bowie, Iggy and the Stooges, and a touch of the Rolling Stones’ swagger. We were listening to ‘Tumbling Dice’ around that time.

We wanted PALAZZO to be a more immediate, radio-friendly introduction to our forthcoming concept album, BOUTIQUE. Something that retained our cinematic DNA but carried the spontaneity, groove and attitude of a great rock’n’roll track.

A doorway into what’s coming next.

FORRM brings together alternative rock, electronics, live instrumentation and soundtrack influences. How do you bring all of these different elements together when creating music?

The most important thing is that we write music organically.

A lot happens when we reunite for a studio session or a live performance. Ideas start bubbling up, musicians react to one another, and we build from there.

The original PALAZZO jam, for instance, was probably around twenty minutes long. That version is actually available as a limited-edition tape on our Forbidden Boutique Tape Deck platform.

From there, we take the material back into the studio and gradually sculpt it into something more definite, more structured and layered. The electronics, textures and cinematic elements find their place quite naturally within that process.

But the reverse can also happen. Some songs on the forthcoming album began with a simple acoustic guitar and developed through a much more classical approach to composition.

Ultimately, we don’t impose a particular formula. We let the music suggest its own direction.

‘PALAZZO’ was recorded at Bloom Studios. What was the recording process like, and were there any unexpected moments or discoveries that became part of the final track?

I relocated to the south of France about two years ago, after spending two years in Athens, and began developing new musical collaborations there, notably with Marin Henrion at Bloom Studios, on the Gulf of Saint-Tropez, and Bill Cox of Coccinelle.

Marin and I established a very constructive creative relationship. He was able to delve into my musical vision, and producing and mixing with him at Bloom Studios became a particularly rewarding experience.

We maintained our nomadic approach to production, layering recordings from different locations and musicians, including Kamyar Rahmani Kia, David Pattillo and Charlie Sheft.

One particularly interesting development concerned the bassline.

The original bassline was written by Kamyar Rahmani Kia. Marin subsequently developed a Juno synthesizer arrangement around it, bringing an electronic dimension to the track that became an essential part of its character.

I love that kind of creative accident, when something already strong takes on an entirely new identity through another musician’s interpretation.

That’s really the spirit of FORRM: an ongoing conversation between musicians, instruments, places and ideas.

Venice is an important part of the world around ‘PALAZZO’. What is it about Venice that inspires you, and how did the city influence this release?

My relationship with Venice goes back to 2021, when I began developing Gates of Turan for the Kyrgyz Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale.

Since then, I’ve developed a very special connection with the city, its people and its extraordinary artistic fabric.

Venice vibrates culturally like nowhere else. It’s a city that never sleeps when it comes to culture. If it’s not theatre, it’s cinema. If it’s not cinema, it’s architecture. And then, of course, there’s contemporary art. It’s an extraordinary agora for artistic expression.

Over the years, I’ve made close friends there and developed what I can only describe as a personal connection with the spirit of the city.

I genuinely feel at home in Venice.

Every year since, I’ve returned to organise exhibitions, performances or both. Palazzo Dandolo, where we held the exhibition in 2025 and where the original PALAZZO jam was born, belongs to a family I’m very close to.

So the music emerged from something entirely organic, a combination of friendship, artistic exchange and the emotional energy of the place.

For me, Venice represents something increasingly precious in these troubled times: a beacon of light, where culture remains a powerful force for freedom and expression.

You work across music, film and contemporary art. How does your work in those other areas influence the way you approach making music?

I would have to go back to my first musical adventure, Playground, which signed with the Parisian label Catalog Records / Le Village Vert around 2003–2004.

We developed three albums, each increasingly conceptual. The third, Playground Nightology, was produced in collaboration with Éric Chedeville, who had worked within the Daft Punk circle and with Sébastien Tellier.

It was conceived as a journey through a single dreamlike night, a cinematic concept album inspired by works such as The Who’s Tommy and Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

I already had the ambition to develop a film alongside it, although that project never materialised.

When the Playground adventure ended around 2010, I naturally moved further into contemporary art, initially through painting and abstraction, which I’ve always considered extensions of the internal geographies that music expresses so effortlessly.

Gradually, my exhibitions evolved towards installations incorporating video, sound and performance.

I’ve always said that the future of image is sound, and the future of sound is image.

To me, they’ve never really been separate disciplines.

A turning point came with my 2020 Marrakech exhibition, Memorandum of the Unknown Path, for which I composed the entire musical soundscape.

That cross-disciplinary approach continued through my participation in the Venice Biennale in 2022 and the development of our first album, FORRM NU FORRM.

Tracks such as ‘Shimmer’ and ‘Gates of Turan’ became part of that artistic universe, extending into my documentary PATH.

Music, cinema and contemporary art are simply different languages through which I explore the same ideas.

You have developed FORRM across places including France, New York, Venice and Morocco. How have these different places and experiences shaped the music you make?

As someone displaced by the Iranian Revolution of 1979, I’ve spent most of my life living between cultures.

With family in New York, London, Paris, Spain and Morocco, this nomadic existence has always been a natural part of who I am. It has given me the opportunity to develop a vision of art and music that is fundamentally borderless.

I’ve never felt particularly attached to one geography or one cultural identity. On the contrary, I find that the most interesting things happen when different worlds collide.

New York has always held a special place in my life. Most of my musicians are based there, and it’s also where we’ve established We Are The Nomads, alongside our partner Ariane Spney, who works closely with my longtime friend and FORRM bandmate Kamyar Rahmani Kia on the music side of the company.

That international network isn’t something we’ve constructed artificially. It has grown organically through friendships, collaborations and shared experiences over many years.

I suppose that openness is reflected in FORRM’s music. We don’t really think in terms of geographical or stylistic boundaries. We draw from wherever inspiration comes, allowing different influences, cultures and musical traditions to coexist within the same creative universe.

You have chosen to focus on independent radio, specialist press and cultural networks rather than traditional Spotify playlist promotion. Why is that approach important to you?

For me, freedom of expression and fair remuneration for artists are inseparable.

I’ve always been struck by how the music industry has historically turned the balance of power against its creators. From Elvis Presley and the Beatles to the present day, the stories are endless.

And I’ve always admired artists who managed to retain control over their work. I recently watched a documentary about the Eagles and their struggle to preserve their publishing rights and artistic integrity. That kind of independence is deeply inspiring to me.

The digital revolution could have been a tremendous opportunity to restore that power to artists. Instead, I believe figures like those behind Spotify chose to reinforce the leverage of major labels and platforms. We have reached the rather cynical point where artists are expected to finance their own promotion, compete for algorithmic visibility, and somehow accept this as a form of liberation.

That genuinely revolts me.

Fortunately, I sense a growing resistance within the industry and the independent press. Artists are beginning to question this system and explore alternative ways of circulating their work without surrendering control of their creative expression.

My background in contemporary art has shaped my understanding of this. Limited editions, direct relationships with collectors and audiences, and genuine exchanges around a work can be infinitely more rewarding than chasing millions of anonymous streams. Music deserves to be experienced as art, not simply consumed as another fast-moving digital product.

With FORRM, we’ve always embraced limited-edition physical releases alongside a highly curated digital presence. And with our forthcoming concept album, BOUTIQUE, we want to take this philosophy considerably further.

We’re exploring collaborations with traditional terrestrial radio stations, possibly even releasing certain material exclusively over the airwaves, encouraging listeners to rediscover radio-cassette players and the pleasure of recording, collecting and physically possessing music.

Imagine having to tune into a particular frequency, at a particular moment, to discover a piece of music that isn’t available everywhere, all the time.

There’s something wonderfully subversive, almost romantic, about that.

And that’s precisely where we want to take BOUTIQUE: away from the tyranny of permanent digital availability and back towards discovery, intimacy and the simple pleasure of listening.

Less algorithm. More human connection.

FORRM has explored quite different sounds across releases such as ‘GALACTICA’, ‘JUNKIE WAYZ’ and ‘NOMADS PRAYER’. How does ‘PALAZZO’ compare with your earlier work, and what feels different about it?

It’s interesting to connect these tracks because, in many ways, they represent different stages of the same musical evolution.

If you go back to our first album, FORRM NU FORRM, in 2022, and a track like ‘Gates of Turan’, which was essentially an instrumental composition layered with a rather poetic spoken-word recording, you can already hear a more structured, powerful psychedelic rock sound beginning to take shape.

The next step was ‘GALACTICA’, inspired by the physicist Carlo Rovelli and his fascinating approach to the organic nature of the universe. There was also something of David Bowie and ‘Space Oddity’ in there—that space-age, slightly funky psychedelic feeling.

‘GALACTICA’ was the first single we released with our new New York lineup in 2024. We first performed it at the Soho Playhouse and subsequently released it on vinyl. It’s still one of our favourite tracks and will feature on BOUTIQUE.

The original composition was probably twenty minutes long. We brought it down to eight, then eventually four. That process of sculpting an extended improvisation into a more definite song became an important part of our approach.

‘JUNKIE WAYZ’ came from a different place. It was actually an older composition from my Playground days, something I’d carried around for years but never properly recorded. During rehearsals in New York, we started playing it, and everything just clicked. Again, we recorded something like a twelve-minute jam and built the final track from there.

‘JUNKIE WAYZ’ explored the grungier, blues-rock, almost noisy side of our sound. I love that dirty, slightly dangerous energy we can sometimes produce.

With ‘PALAZZO’, I think we found a natural middle ground between those two worlds: the cosmic, funky psychedelia of ‘GALACTICA’ and the raw, blues-driven energy of ‘JUNKIE WAYZ’.

In some ways, it even reminds me of ‘1994’, my first Playground single, which became something of a breakthrough for that project back in 2005. There is a similar immediacy, a certain swagger and a groove that carries the whole thing.

What connects all these songs is that we never really start with a formula. We follow the energy of the music, allow it to develop organically, and then gradually sculpt it into shape.

‘PALAZZO’ feels like the moment when those different musical instincts finally came together.

The ‘PALAZZO’ video turns the band and the building into almost one psychedelic environment. What were you trying to create for someone watching it rather than just listening to the song?

The video is actually a pretty good representation of our whole adventure with ‘PALAZZO’. It brings together different moments in the life of the song.

The Venice footage was shot with my friend Dusan Smodej, who was also producing my exhibition at the time. One morning, around five o’clock, he was taking us to the airport on his boat through the completely deserted Venetian canals. It was an extraordinary ride, almost surreal.

We had been partying pretty hard during those days, and some of that atmosphere inevitably found its way into ‘PALAZZO’. In fact, during the breakdown of the song, you can actually hear me calling out to Dusan!

Visually, I wanted to capture that psychedelic energy, so I experimented with some post-production effects, giving the Venice footage a slightly retro, almost ’80s Grateful Dead psychedelic feeling.

The other part of the video comes from our live performance at Domaine de la Croix, a beautiful winery overlooking the Gulf of Saint-Tropez, where we played in June 2026.

That concert, titled Dedication to the Sun, is available on Bandcamp, as well as on YouTube Music and Apple Music.

I loved the idea of bringing those two worlds together: the intimacy and spontaneity of our Venetian adventure and the collective energy of the band performing live.

There wasn’t really a preconceived visual concept. Much like the song itself, the video came together organically, almost in a flow.

And I think that’s why it works. It genuinely captures the atmosphere, the friendships and the slightly mad psychedelic spirit behind ‘PALAZZO’.

FORRM has this idea of being nomadic, both culturally and creatively. After everything you’ve explored so far, what are you still looking for?

Right now, my focus is on shooting my feature film, SEASON OF THE WITCH, in Morocco this winter, and completing its original soundtrack with FORRM.

It’s where cinema, music and my nomadic artistic journey come together.

Stay tuned!

https://www.forrmsound.com/
https://forrmboutique.bandcamp.com/
https://www.instagram.com/forrm_official

FVMusicBlog October 2026

If you would like to submit your music for a playlist or review consideration, please submit here.

Also! Check out the awesome other artists on the ‘Discovered This Week’ Playlist!