The project belongs to Firouz FarmanFarmaian, an Iranian-French filmmaker, artist and musician who treats a stage as one more surface to be projected upon. At the MAD his imagery was thrown directly across the players while the music triggered and warped it in real time. Cinema, installation and concert collapsed into a single event. Heard without a frame of the pictures, such a night might be expected to deflate into a souvenir. It does not. The playing carries its own images, and the record stands up as music first.

The centrepiece is "Nomad's Prayer," the piece that doubles as the soundtrack to FarmanFarmaian's film *PATH*. Here it is stretched and deepened in front of an audience. The tempo is that of a caravan, unhurried and sure of its horizon. Guitars shimmer and smear instead of strutting, electronics hover at the edges like heat on a road, and the rhythm section holds a pulse steady enough to lean your whole weight against. The voice enters from a distance, human and faintly out of reach. Phrases repeat until repetition turns into weather. It is psychedelia of the older, ritual kind, concerned with trance and arrival rather than with decorative swirl.

Discipline keeps the thing honest. The improvisation is conducted rather than indulged, and the musicians, reunited at the MAD in what became FORRM's definitive lineup, listen to one another with an attentiveness that outranks virtuosity. Passages swell and withdraw with the unflustered confidence of players who trust their silences. When the band finally gathers itself and surges, the weight lands in the chest a beat before the ear has finished its paperwork.

The live setting is a gift. Nothing has been varnished into submission. You can sense the size of the room and the held breath of a crowd, and you can hear a band discovering something it did not know it owned. A studio would have tidied all this away and the music would be poorer for it. The cinematic leanings of earlier releases such as *GALACTICA* and *NOMADS PRAYER* are audible too, though the alternative-rock bones of *FORRM NU FORRM* and the raw edge of *JUNKIE WAYZ* keep the sound from drifting into mere soundtrack. This is a band that has learned to be a score and a spectacle without ceasing to be a band.

The record's afterlife is as handsome as its birth. The performance was lifted out as the digital artwork *Into the Vortex*, folded into the visual architecture of *PATH*, and turned into a concert film now selected for The Psychedelic Film and Music Festival 2026 in New York. WRTN Music has re-released the recording to coincide with the film's return to the city that hosted the original night. Music becomes picture, picture returns to music, and the listener is left standing in the middle of the loop. It is a persuasive demonstration of FORRM's creed that sound should roam freely between concert hall, cinema and gallery.

The project's habits suit the music. Independent radio, specialist press, physical editions and direct networks are preferred to the algorithmic scramble, and *Live in NYC* rewards that kind of attention. It will not satisfy anyone wanting a hook every ninety seconds, and the exit is clearly marked for them. For listeners willing to surrender an evening, it is a rich, hypnotic and thrilling document of a band finding its true shape in public.