Ava Rasti is an Iranian musician and composer based in Berlin. A pianist and bass guitarist, she began her solo project in 2020, developing a practice that moves between electronic music, acoustic instruments, improvisation and composition. Following her 2025 album The River, Iranian composer and sound artist Ava Rasti returns to 130701 with No One Knows How Wild the Wind Blows, her second release for the label. Announced for pre-order on 26 August with the album’s title track as its first single, and followed by “Tehran” ahead of its release on 30 October 2026. The album expands the sonic world of Rasti’s debut 130701 release The River into something broader, darker and more unsettled. Built from immersive ambient textures, drones and melodic fragments that drift in and out of view, the record carries a continual sense of movement. There is weight and vulnerability throughout, but also an underlying restlessness—as though the music itself is searching, never quite settling in one place before moving on. Written between 2024 and 2026, the album emerged during a period in which Rasti found herself living between countries while searching for somewhere to call home. As one place gave way to another, questions of belonging, identity and displacement gradually became woven into the music. Questions of home and belonging gradually came to define the album. A recurring touchstone during its creation was Elizabeth Bishop’s poem Questions of Travel, whose lines, “The map looks wide, but the choice is never free. Here or there? Or should we have stayed at home, wherever home may be?”, echoed many of the questions Rasti found herself returning to. “I wanted to explore the tension between the desire to leave and the need to belong,” she says. “Rather than offering answers, the album sits with these contradictions, tracing a search for home in a world where home can feel both deeply familiar and impossibly distant.” As the record slowly took shape, those questions became increasingly difficult to separate from events unfolding in Iran. Watching the outbreak of war from afar while unable to return home profoundly altered the emotional landscape in which the album was completed. Although never conceived as a response to those events, No One Knows How Wild the Wind Blows inevitably became entwined with them. Its title, inspired by Molly Drake’s How Wild the Wind Blows, became a way of understanding the forces that shape our lives beyond our control. “The title speaks to the vulnerability of living through uncertain times while continuing to move forward without knowing where the wind will carry us,” Rasti explains. “Like a ship in the ocean, everything depends on the pressure of the wind.” Released alongside the album announcement, the title track was composed during the twelve-day war in Iran in the summer of 2025 while Rasti was in Berlin. “I found myself feeling lost inside a storm of uncertainty, as if I were somehow dancing through it while carrying the heaviness of life. I was in Berlin and unable to return to Iran, which deepened a sense of dislocation and suspension. The piece became a way of holding that moment, when everything felt like it could shift at any time, and I had no control over where I might land next.” The second single, “Tehran,” was the final piece written for the album during Rasti’s last visit to the city. Shortly after she left, the war began. Looking back, the piece became a reflection on a city that remains deeply loved, while belonging to it has become increasingly complex. Elsewhere, “The Wind Will Take Us Away” takes its title from the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad and incorporates a recording made inside an old church in Freiburg while Rasti was composing music for a theatre adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial. A woman’s voice repeating, “Jesus will take care of us,” is woven into the composition, quietly raising the question of whether anything can offer certainty amid an increasingly chaotic world. “I Told The Mountain” is dedicated to the mountains surrounding Tehran, where Rasti once spent countless hours hiking, while “The Wind Passes By The Willow Tree” reflects on the fleeting traces left by love, memory and sorrow—moments that pass like wind through branches, yet continue to resonate long afterwards. With No One Knows How Wild the Wind Blows, Ava Rasti has created her most expansive work to date. It is a record shaped as much by movement as by place, one that quietly asks what remains when the idea of home becomes less certain, and the only thing still carrying us forward is the wind.