We recently featured FORRM as they explored decadence, surrealist escapism and the blurred boundaries between pleasure and reality with their new single, PALAZZO. So naturally we wanted to dig a little deeper and had a chance to chat with the artist behind the project, Firouz Farman-Farmaian, about PALAZZO and FORRM‘s wider artistic intention from the Venetian setting that inspired the track to his multidisciplinary practice across music, film and visual art. Firouz reflects on creative freedom, cultural identity and the value of resisting a world increasingly driven by speed and optimization.
1. Palazzo feels like a song about excess, but there’s also something quite reflective underneath it. What were you actually trying to say with it?
In Fellini’s Casanova, Giacomo meets a British lord lost deep in revelry who tells him that his excess helps him attain the ultimate Nirvana: forgetfulness. Casanova replies that he “voyages in inexistent lands.”
PALAZZO voyages in those inexistent lands. It was inspired by the ethereal quality of the Venetian lagoon, where the song was conceived and written around a contemporary art installation and FORRM performance at Palazzo Dandolo during the Mostra in September 2025.
Underneath – or perhaps hovering over – that tapestry, there’s a reflection on the cheap, fast consumption of success versus the slow pursuit of beauty and excellence.
PALAZZO comes from choosing experience over optimization. Being in Venice, in an old palazzo, with a gang of solid friends, wandering through misty streets and canals. In a culture obsessed with acceleration, metrics, business plans and instantly consumable success, slowness, beauty, late nights (very late nights) and being fully entrenched become true acts of rebellion.
We’re holding the line.
2. The line “wine in my veins and mist in my mind” feels like it sits between pleasure and losing yourself. Where did that side of the song come from?
The line comes from something quite prosaic and lived. Venice has become a recurring point in my creative life since 2022, when I opened the Kyrgyz Pavilion, Gates of Turan, and FORRM performed around the soundtrack we had created for it.
Since then, I keep returning to Venice for installations, screenings, performances, usually surrounded by this international gang of musicians, artists and friends. Our nights tend to unfold somewhere between work and elegant revelry, fuelled by good wine, friendship and the Venetian mist.
After a few days of actually living there rather than visiting, something strange happens: the outside world begins to disappear. So “wine in my veins and mist in my mind” is quite literal, but the mist also became a metaphor for that state of creative liberation, when you lose your bearings just enough to voyage somewhere else.
3. You come from film, visual art and music. Do you experience those as separate worlds, or are they really one language for you?
I come from the visual first – painting, drawing, the linear world. My grandfather was an architect and introduced me to Impressionism very young. I started painting around thirteen or fourteen, then music arrived through my father’s love of the ’60s. I bought my first guitar at sixteen, studied architecture at the Beaux-Arts for a couple of years, and eventually moved towards experimental film because it allowed me to bring texture, image, sound and narrative together.
So I’ve always moved very fluidly between disciplines. The difficulty is that the cultural industries aren’t necessarily built for that fluidity. They need categories, particularly when marketing, budgets and return on investment enter the conversation. If your artistic evolution matters more to you than answering that siren call, you have to accept a longer road and allow your language to become coherent organically over time.
I’ve always adored artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, where music and painting were completely intertwined, and Julian Schnabel, who emerged from that same extraordinary period in New York and whose trajectory, with time, has increasingly crossed between painting and cinema. There’s something very liberating to me in refusing those boundaries.
My own language works slightly differently. It unfolds in chapters and layers – painting, film, music, installation – but ultimately they’re all parts of the same conversation.
4. Why a palazzo? What does that image mean to you beyond the Italian word for a palace?
There’s a joy and an irony in the image. Duchamp’s urinal was conceived as an assault on bourgeois definitions of art, yet today it belongs to the canon of the very establishment it challenged. You see a similar paradox with Banksy: an anti-system language eventually entering the highest reaches of the art market.
So I started thinking about what rebellion actually means today. In the punk era, perhaps you made your record in a squat; in reggae, you might imagine a funked up studio in Kingston. Today, there’s something almost more subversive to me about being independent enough to gather your friends and musicians inside a Venetian palazzo, make the work exactly as you want it, and have no creative ties to an industry telling you what it should sound or look like.
The palazzo becomes a kind of inversion of the old codes. Luxury isn’t the objective, freedom is. And perhaps, in an age obsessed with speed, optimization and consumption, the optimal contemporary rebellion is elegance.
5. The spoken word section feels almost like someone stepping out of the song and telling you what this world is really about. How did that monologue come into the track?
To be true to you, spoken word has always been somewhere inside my songwriting. Before music, or alongside it, there was literature. I went deeply into Hemingway, Somerset Maugham and Céline, the French Surrealists, then the American Beat Generation – Burroughs, Kerouac and especially Allen Ginsberg. Howl never really left me, and that connects further back to my love of Rimbaud.
Following Dylan, I see artists like Patti Smith as inheritors of that lineage, particularly that New York tradition where music can move seamlessly into poetry and poetry back into rhythm.
Most of my monologues happen quite instinctively. I’ll have a few written lines, then do a couple of takes improvising around them until the language solidifies. In PALAZZO, I think of it almost as a poetic breakdown, not so far removed from the function of the breakdown in old-school rap, except that here the rhythm is carried by the words.
Thematically, I sometimes let distant political echoes enter those passages, but as impressionistic brushstrokes rather than declarations or positions. I’ve never really seen art through the idea of activism. I prefer to think of the artist as an activator rather than an activist, someone who opens a space and lets something resonate.
6. There’s something psychedelic about the way PALAZZO moves between the guitars, saxophone and rhythm. Are you interested in music as a way of altering someone’s perception?
I’ve always loved the story of Jim Morrison meeting Ray Manzarek on Venice Beach and saying, let’s start a band and call it The Doors – after Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. That idea is almost in the DNA of great rock and roll: music as a door into an altered state.
For me, psychedelia becomes particularly interesting when rock starts touching jazz. That’s one reason I’ve always loved the Grateful Dead, the two drummers, the open-ended structures, that willingness for a song to stop being a fixed object and become a space you enter. The Doors were exploring something similar. At their most interesting, those bands were standing right at the edge of jazz.
I sometimes feel rock could have gone much further down that road. Certain bands continued exploring it through the ’70s and beyond, but increasingly the form became codified again.
And ultimately I approach it in much the same way I approach abstract painting. When you stand in front of a Rothko, for instance, the painting isn’t simply communicating info, it’s there to alter your emotional or perceptual state. Music can do exactly the same thing.
So yes, absolutely. I think it’s part of the attributes of good art to assess that and to achieve that.
7. Your work moves between France, New York, Morocco and other places. Do you feel like you belong to a particular culture, or have you become more interested in existing between cultures?
I’m an optimistic determinist. Being exiled from Iran after the Revolution at a very young age, with the nucleus of my family dispersed around the planet, put me in the position of chasing a lost identity while simultaneously having to construct a new one. Inevitably, that gave me a broader outlook on cultural diversity.
So yes, I believe deeply in a borderless approach to art. I keep repeating that the real avant-garde exists where cultures clash: in the spark produced by that encounter.
Of course, there are dangers. In this post-globalized moment, the dream of becoming one interconnected planet has partly backfired into cultures retreating into defensive positions, with violence and racism as the most destructive expressions of that. But I remain optimistic. Globalization has already brought us closer together in ways that I don’t think can simply be reversed. Ultimately we’ll get there, through hardship or through peace, and perhaps one day we’ll even carry that vision beyond this planet.
In that sense, determinism has also shaped the way I actually live and work. My studio is in Morocco, my company is based in France and associated in the United States, and my collaborators come from all over the world. I don’t really experience those places as contradictions anymore. They’ve become the geography of the work itself.
8. You’ve worked with film, documentaries and visual art as well as music. When you’re making a piece of music, do you already see the film around it in your head?
I work in chapters, all connected to a very patient, catalogued and indexed internal diary. In a way, you could read the entire breadth of my work since 2005 – published or unpublished, whether music, writing, film or visual art – as the evolution of that diary. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to connect all the dots.
I think that’s ultimately what many artists are searching for: through the apparent chaos, to find an experimental coherence, and through that coherence, freedom.
PATH, my documentary currently on the festival trail, is a good example. It recently received Best Soundtrack awards in Athens and Rotterdam. The film documents the creation of my installation for the Kyrgyz Republic in Venice, including my time travelling through the Tian Shan in Kyrgyzstan researching and producing the work. Music was already emerging as demos during those journeys, but it was only later, during post-production, that it came together as the 25-minute piece Nomads Prayer, originating from a long studio jam in the hills above Tarifa in southern Spain.
So when I’m creating, I don’t necessarily see a finished film in my head. It’s more a feeling, a beat, a general direction, a pulse that informs image, sound, writing, everything simultaneously. Eventually those elements find each other.
9. 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?
Coming from the visual side, I’m always trying to alter the viewer’s perception, to bring them into a kind of abstract trance where music, image and effects begin to melt into one. To me, that’s what a successful music video can do. I’m not saying this one succeeds, but that was certainly the intention.
The process was quite long. The Venice material was shot at Palazzo Dandolo in September 2025, when PALAZZO was originally conceived. The first demo actually emerged from a jam on the opening night of my show there.
Then in June, the whole band reunited in the South of France while we were recording music for my upcoming feature, Season of the Witch. We played a concert at Domaine de la Croix, a winery, at sunset, and took the opportunity to film the performance with several cameras and a drone in this extraordinary natural light.
I then wrote the lyrics by hand in China ink on drawing paper and brought that calligraphy directly into the film. So Venice, the band, the landscape, the words and the music all became part of one continuous thread.
Strangely, it took about eight months to gather all those elements and perhaps a day or two to edit them. Once everything was there, it came together almost instinctively.
10. FORRM has this idea of being nomadic, both culturally and creatively. After everything you’ve explored so far, what are you still looking for?
The idea of nomadism takes a lot from moving with the seasons : listening to the signs of the natural elements, being connected to the universe because, originally, your survival depended upon it. I find that an extraordinarily beautiful philosophy of life, and personally it has brought me increasingly close to Tao and to meditating on those ideas.
I think there’s something there worth sharing, particularly at this moment of extraordinary acceleration, when the world seems constantly on fire and we’re running from one wildfire to the next. We’ve succeeded in our industrial revolution to the point where we’re now preparing to hand much of our work over to machines. Perhaps this is precisely the moment to ask: where were we before all of this? How did ancient cultures communicate with the universe in ways that were perhaps more sophisticated and certainly more natural than we imagine today?
That connects very naturally to the borderlessness and multiculturalism that have informed everything we’ve done through We R The Nomads over the years, whether in contemporary art, music or film.
And now what awaits us is probably our biggest adventure and challenge so far: Season of the Witch. The ambition is to bring all these languages together under one umbrella – a feature film that is simultaneously an album, an experimental film, a narrative film and a contemporary art piece.
The challenge is to achieve that without compromising the language to fit the demands of the large platforms, to remain genuinely independent, bring it to festivals next year, and hopefully find an equally independent route to bring it to the world.
That path is what I’m still looking for today.