A look back on a year of The Invisible Road

Starting your week with a look back on a year of Sussan Deyhim and Richard Horowitz’s The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985-1990.

Deyhim and Horowitz’s decades-long partnership blossomed from a chance meeting at Noise New York, an intimate West 34th street studio housing the creative energies of Arthur Russell, Christian Marclay, and other downtown visionaries. though each hailed from drastically different worlds—Deyhim, a tehran-born vocalist who regularly graced Iranian television before studying ballet in Belgium, and Horowitz, a Buffalo-born composer immersed in Paris’ free jazz underground—the pair found common ground in a revolutionary vision of avant-pop.

Striving to create a body of music “free of any specific cultural reference, with a personal musical signature”, the pair crafted works that interlace Deyhim’s inimitable vocalizations with Horowitz’s daring compositions, each piece infused with the pair’s extensive engagement with both experimental music and globe-spanning musical traditions. The result is an extraordinary expression, music with a wholly singular sound.

In 2024, Deyhim, Horowitz, and Freedom To Spend unveiled The Invisible Road, a compilation of previously unheard recordings carefully selected from a valley storage space / treasure trove overflowing with decades of material. The collection stands as a tribute to an enduring creative and romantic partnership, and to the remarkable legacy of Horowitz’s life.