Listening to Daguerreotypes Through the Context of the Bahá’í Faith in Iran
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Warning
This article refers to religious persecution and execution.
What stays with me first in Daguerreotypes’ debut This Is My Way to Tell You That Everything Is Real and Happening Right Now is not the scale of its ideas but the air of the room. The grain of cassette and reel-to-reel tape, the length of a 20-song double album, and the feeling that someone finally managed to shape this work in the narrow gaps left by domestic life and ordinary obligations. In the Bandcamp liner notes, James Samimi Farr describes himself as a “family man,” a “total amateur,” and an “industry outsider.” Pitchfork, likewise, hears the record as music surrounded by everyday objects and drenched in light.12
But the softness of this album does not end with mere domestic intimacy. Elsewhere, Samimi Farr has spoken about being born into a Bahá’í household, and in 2022 he wrote publicly about his wife’s grandfather, Kamran Samimi, who was executed in Iran.34 That means there is something missing if we hear this record only as a miraculous debut from an unknown indie folk singer. Beneath it sit family, community, faith, and the historical weight of Iran, all present without announcing themselves too loudly.
That does not mean the album should be reduced to biography. But once you know what kind of life these songs are resting on, the record begins to resonate differently.
A double album made inside domestic time
According to the Bandcamp notes, the album was built largely around a nine-day session in a cottage in West Quebec in 2022, using TASCAM 488/424 machines and reel-to-reel tape in a way meant to preserve the specific character of the medium.1 Charles James’ production does not function as retro fetishism. It works more like a device for delaying the edges of the sound.
That delay matters. The songs do not rush toward emotional conclusion. They first let you hear room resonance, vocal distance, and the quiet pressure of a physical setting. As Pitchfork puts it, the album has the quality of “room tone,” to the point that you can almost see the paint on the walls.2 This does not mean the music is small. It means the sound arrives only after passing through several layers of life.
In Rolling Stone Japan, Daguerreotypes is introduced as a fully independent artist with no label and no agent. The interview also frames his long period of obscurity, the fact that a follow-up is already underway, and his sense that music’s politics do not operate in the same language as partisan spectacle.5 In that sense, this double album feels less like a myth of late discovery than like a record in which the long duration of obscurity itself has been preserved in sound.
Close to prayer, but not an explanation of doctrine
Pitchfork writes that there is a “God-shaped hole” at the center of this record. That feels right. Songs like “Firefly” and “Take a Great Notion” repeatedly approach something like prayer. But this is not the voice of full confidence. There is hesitation in it, a sense that wanting to believe and being unable to settle into belief remain present at the same time.2
The Bandcamp liner notes place “family,” “community,” and “spiritual life” side by side. What emerges there is not a declaration of religious certainty but a very earthly problem: how to keep artistic longing and the responsibilities of life from destroying one another.1 The album’s spirituality therefore sounds less like transcendence leaving the world behind than like an attempt to stretch toward something larger while remaining inside kitchens, bedrooms, and the breathing of children.
That distinction matters. When a work has a religious background, it is tempting to read it as doctrine in lyrical form or as a confession of faith. Daguerreotypes’ songs are not that closed. They linger instead over the moments when the ordinary texture of life brushes up against metaphysics.
What makes the Bahá’í Faith in Iran “complex”
At that point it helps to pause and outline the context. The Bahá’í Faith begins in Shiraz in 1844 with the declaration of the Báb. His movement was fiercely opposed by Persia’s clergy and state, many followers were killed, and the Báb himself was publicly executed in Tabriz in 1850. Bahá’u’lláh, who would go on to found the Bahá’í Faith, was imprisoned in Tehran and then subjected to forty years of exile and confinement.6
So the Bahá’í Faith is not best understood as something brought into Iran from outside. It is better understood as a religion born within Persia/Iran and then pushed outward from within as heresy. Because of that history of banishment, its holy places and world center came to be located outside Iran.67 That is the first layer of complexity: the Faith is deeply Iranian in origin, yet persistently denied legitimacy by the state.
A second layer is that the story is not exhausted by persecution alone. A recent Bahá’í World News Service podcast emphasizes the role Bahá’í communities played in discussions of education, the advancement of women, and consultative or representative forms of governance in 19th- and early 20th-century Iran.8 In other words, the community contributed to currents of modernization while also being repeatedly excluded from public legitimacy. That double condition has helped make the Bahá’í presence in Iranian history both important and strangely obscured.
There is also the present tense. In his Religion News Service essay, Samimi Farr writes about the 1981 execution of his wife’s grandfather and about the continuing arrests, imprisonment, economic deprivation, and denial of education faced by Bahá’ís in Iran today.4 Here religious history is not a closed chapter. It remains a condition of life.
Why that context changes the weight of “ordinary life”
In Southside Pride, Samimi Farr says he was born into the Bahá’í Faith, with one Bahá’í parent and one Catholic parent. He also describes the Faith as having comparatively porous boundaries toward other religions.3 Once that background is set beside the Bandcamp liner notes, the repeated sequence of “family,” “community,” and “spiritual life” stops sounding like generic maturity.
What this album returns to is not only the frustration of a musician who did not become successful soon enough. It is also the problem of not giving up on art while also not giving up on family and community, of trying to hold those commitments inside a single life rather than treating them as mutually annihilating forces.1 None of that requires us to decode the songs as doctrinal statements. But it does allow us to say that Samimi Farr is not singing from a position untouched by Bahá’í history or by the history of persecution in Iran.
That is why the album’s ordinary scale does not feel light. Instead of writing dramatic events directly, it sings rooms, rivers, family, voice, aging, and community. The selection of those subjects begins to look like an ethic of how to protect a fragile life. It is not a protest record in any loud or direct sense, but that does not mean historical pressure has vanished from it.
Music may not change policy, but it can change the world’s arrangement
In Rolling Stone Japan, Samimi Farr suggests that even if music is political, it is political in a different register from spectacles like the Grammys or the Super Bowl. Music can make people feel they belong to a community and can recontextualize the world, even if that does not automatically translate into policy change.5
That also feels like the right way to hear This Is My Way to Tell You That Everything Is Real and Happening Right Now. It is not a record that explains the Bahá’í Faith in Iran, and it is not a protest album that narrates persecution head-on. But by arranging domestic time, handmade recording, hesitating faith, and a desire for community with such care, it creates a mode of perception that resists being flattened by history.
What matters in introducing Daguerreotypes is not to stop at the familiar story of a hidden genius finally discovered. Behind the warmth of this music is the difficulty of continuing to sing while protecting a life. And behind that sits the long history of a religion born in Iran and repeatedly pushed to the margins within Iran itself.
That context is not the only key to this record. But if you hear it with that knowledge, the voice arrives a little deeper and a little later.
Listen to the Tracks
These are the two songs named most directly in the piece.
Firefly
Take a Great Notion
References
Footnotes
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This Is My Way to Tell You That Everything Is Real and Happening Right Now, Daguerreotypes Bandcamp. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4
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Daguerreotypes: This Is My Way to Tell You That Everything Is Real and Happening Right Now Album Review, Pitchfork. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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The Baha’i Faith, Southside Pride. ↩ ↩2
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James Samimi Farr, My wife's grandfather was executed for his Baha'i faith. Iran hasn't changed enough., Religion News Service, 2022-01-21. ↩ ↩2
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“音楽は世界を再文脈化してくれる” 謎の新人Daguerreotypesが語る、無名時代の20年と第三空間のフォーク, Rolling Stone Japan. ↩ ↩2
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Brief history, Bahá’í World News Service. ↩ ↩2
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The Early Bahá’í Community, bahai.org. ↩
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Insights from the Field: Uncovering early Bahá’í contributions to 19th century Iran—Part 1, Bahá’í World News Service. ↩