Alireza Mashayekhi Persian Electronic Music: Yesterday And Today 1966-2006 CD

Sub Rosa has done it again. This handsomely designed, authoritative, and beautiful-sounding double-CD package focuses on the electronic music of composers Alireza Mashayekhi and Ata "Sote" Ebtekar. Both men have been working in the electronic and vanguard classical fields for years -- in the case of the former, born in 1940, it's been over 40, and the latter, born in 1972, since 1994. They both employ ancestral structures as a way of creating something radically new and different. In the case of Mashayekhi, his works have been performed extensively at home and abroad. The original folk and sacred music forms in his works (all of them appear on disc one) are immediately detectable. He uses these melodies; covers them over; stretches them; washes them in warm baths of sound, space, and texture; and allows them space to breathe through time. He actually stretches the notion of time; what the listener hears is instantly recognizable as something old, but presented in a wildly different context without sacrificing its character or even content. By contrast, Ebtekar, who has been schooled and raised in a world that initially embraced the West only to reject it, has been on both sides of the post-structuralist divide; his notion of deconstruction, which happened literally in Iran, is experientially cultural rather than theoretically academic. Therefore, his questions about sound and the ancestral music of his culture have to be looked at through that split prism. Being a recording engineer as well as a composer and sound artist, his source materials were the old Persian scales themselves. He actually goes to town altering their modal framework and time signatures, compressing and stretching them, and in some cases turning them inside out. What remains however, is the actual "Persian-ness" of it all. It is unmistakably Middle Eastern, no matter how much he shifts modalities or even alters melodic constructs between or through scales or manipulates sound and dynamic tensions. It sounds like history and feels like history, but is so unmistakably "new" that it makes history, and it is strange and beguiling enough to make you completely question what you are hearing. ~ Thom Jurek

The Sub Rosa label presents the work of Alireza Mashayekhi and Ata Ebtekar/Sote, two essential, key luminaries in the so far very unknown electronic music scene as composed in Iran from the '60s until today. These Iranian music masters work on ancestral structures to create something radically new, travelling around the world as vivid creators, working through the hazards of history. Alireza Mashayekhi (b. 1940) is a pioneer Iranian avant-garde composer whose ideas and works have been performed in his home country and abroad for more than 35 years. Ata Ebtekar aka Sote (b.1972) is an electronic composer, sound artist and recording engineer who is interested in recasting the tuning of Persian classical scales (radif) and melodies from old Persian folk songs within a new electronic framework. Since he has a firm conviction that rules and formulas have to be deconstructed and rethought, he alters some of these modal systems from their original tonality and rhythm. He has released several CDs and vinyls on Dielectric/RLR, Spundae and Warp. Sub Rosa offers you a Persian history lesson that finally exposes this region's rich and significant contribution to the realm of electronic music.The Wire (p.52) - "[An] intelligent, well-annotated collection....[These two] invoke the ghost country not with rose tinted nostalgia but by cunningly trowelling ageless patterns into the stonework of their music."
Record Collector (magazine) (pp.96-97) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "[This] collection throws the spotlight on two Iranian musicians whose music represents 40 years of Persian sonic exploration and experimentation, but looks back even further."