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viewing 1 To 9 of 9 items
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SMR 081LP
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How can a sense of beauty be found amidst fear and cruelty? How can all the unspeakable be made audible, but also anger, hope, and an unyielding will to live? With his third album Temple Of Hope, Iranian composer Saba Alizadeh has created a moving homage to the people of his homeland. He transforms the events during the "Woman Life Freedom" movement, as well as the struggles of the population in previous years, into poignant electro-acoustic music. Intensified by the vocals and lyrics of Andreas Spechtl, Sanam Maroufkhani, and Leila Rahimi. In his compositions, Saba Alizadeh combines the traditional string instrument Kamancheh with strings, modular synthesizers, and a no-input mixer. This results in a tense sound that explores the speechlessness and torn emotions between suffering, rebellion, and hope. Historical radio sequences ground his pieces in the culture and history of the country. The strong alienation and deconstruction of these acoustic elements, in turn, point to the incomprehensible -- to existential upheavals and dissolution processes.
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CD
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SMR 072CD
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A unique blend of traditional Iranian sounds and contemporary electronic music, featuring vocal features by renowned Iranian artists. Ecstatic dance music to get lost in. Esfand is the final month of the Persian calendar, ending with the Nowruz spring festival. Esfand is also a band, founded in 2020, consisting of Rouzbeh Esfand and Patrick Stewart. A duo that fuses traditional Iranian Folk elements with Western beats to create something completely new. Their debut album Piltan is a flamboyantly danceable statement. No crossover kitsch. Pure instinct music. For his master's thesis, Rouzbeh studied the millennia-old rituals and customs of various Iranian ethnic groups. Piltan is a sonic journey through a vast country full of cultural peculiarities: starting with the southern Zār rituals of the Persian Gulf, moving to the equestrian people of the Bakhtiari in the southwest, on to the Qashqai in the west and to the Kurds in northwestern Iran with their Dervish rituals. "We're not just about Techno," says Pat. "It's about feeling, groove and excitement." Vocal features by renowned Iranian artists are tailored to the songwriting. Singer and percussionist Habib Meftah is featured on two songs. On "Shawl", Mohsen Namjoo guest stars, another folk expert, singing lyrics by well- known Iranian poets Daqiqi and Farrukhi Sistani. London singer Misagh Moradi is featured on "Without Foot, Without Head", based on texts by world-famous poet Rumi. Piltan is the follow-up to 2021's Héle. Folk meets techno, millennia-old music meets Western club culture.
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SMR 071LP
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LP version. A unique blend of traditional Iranian sounds and contemporary electronic music, featuring vocal features by renowned Iranian artists. Ecstatic dance music to get lost in. Esfand is the final month of the Persian calendar, ending with the Nowruz spring festival. Esfand is also a band, founded in 2020, consisting of Rouzbeh Esfand and Patrick Stewart. A duo that fuses traditional Iranian Folk elements with Western beats to create something completely new. Their debut album Piltan is a flamboyantly danceable statement. No crossover kitsch. Pure instinct music. For his master's thesis, Rouzbeh studied the millennia-old rituals and customs of various Iranian ethnic groups. Piltan is a sonic journey through a vast country full of cultural peculiarities: starting with the southern Zār rituals of the Persian Gulf, moving to the equestrian people of the Bakhtiari in the southwest, on to the Qashqai in the west and to the Kurds in northwestern Iran with their Dervish rituals. "We're not just about Techno," says Pat. "It's about feeling, groove and excitement." Vocal features by renowned Iranian artists are tailored to the songwriting. Singer and percussionist Habib Meftah is featured on two songs. On "Shawl", Mohsen Namjoo guest stars, another folk expert, singing lyrics by well- known Iranian poets Daqiqi and Farrukhi Sistani. London singer Misagh Moradi is featured on "Without Foot, Without Head", based on texts by world-famous poet Rumi. Piltan is the follow-up to 2021's Héle. Folk meets techno, millennia-old music meets Western club culture.
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30M 004CD
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Aftab Darvishi: a distinctive voice that combines her classical music training with the diverse influences of her native Iran. A Thousand Butterflies is a portrait album that looks back on Darvishi's eleven-year journey as a composer and tells of a life -- hers -- that has crossed continents. "Each piece on this album tells a part of my life that has taken place in every corner of the world," shares Aftab Darvishi, whose music draws on a wide variety of styles. She presents works for a variety of instruments and electronics on her debut album. "When I compose, I don't think about style," Darvishi says. "It's not that logical, it's not very calculated. It's more by instinct. My music is not just Persian music -- it's much more than that: it's an approach to being." "Sahar" (Dawn) opens Darvishi's album; it is the most recent composition on the recording. Based on a traditional melody from the Kermanshah region, traditionally played at dawn as a morning wake-up call, Aftab Darvishi has written "Sahar", a work for cello that uses traditional Persian playing techniques. Originally, this melody was heard on the sorna -- later it was also played on the tanbur and mixed with vocals. A live recording of a performance by the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet in Stockholm during the Corona period follows: "Hidden Dream" is vivid, telling of journeys, hopes, dreams. The following work "A Thousand Butterflies", namesake of the album ties in with dreams and hopes: The piece for clarinet and piano is inspired by the experience of immigration, recalling those people who daily leave their homes forever: "In my imagination, thousands of men and women fly toward a better future," Aftab Darvishi says. In each of the three movements, she looks at immigration from a different perspective, conveying to listeners the diversity of experiences and feelings of immigrants. The earliest composition, "Forgetfulness", was recorded in Tehran, as was "Sahar", but before she went to the Netherlands to study composition. It has accompanied Aftab Darvishi on her travels ever since and is always a reminder of her origins. The album closes with the atmospheric "Plutone".
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30M 003LP
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With I May Never See You Again, the Iranian composer, musician and virtuoso of the Kamanche violin Saba Alizadeh will release his first album on the newly founded Hamburg label 30M. As on his debut album Scattered Memories from 2019, the 37-year-old Saba Alizadeh mixes his instrumental virtuosity with spherical electronics, samples of Persian musical instruments and field recordings from his hometown Tehran. Born in Tehran in 1983 to world-renowned tar and setar virtuoso Hossein Alizadeh, Saba studied the Iranian Kamanche violin with Saeed Farajpoury and Keyhan Kalhor, as well as photography and later experimental sound art with Mark Trayle at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles. Influenced by the conceptual approaches taught there, Saba Alizadeh's music is based on Iranian traditions and scales, only to deconstruct and abstract them in the next step. As a result, the nine mostly instrumental tracks on If I Ever See You Again inspire as sonically differentiated meditations on the subject of memory. For example, in the track "Silences Inbetween", Saba proceeds highly conceptually, when he amplifies the breathing pauses of silence in speeches of dictators from past times in historical acoustic reverberation rooms to such an extent that this silence becomes audible as distortion. The silence of the masses, "Silences Inbetween" reports, is thus by no means merely neutral sound or noise, but consists of highly charged vibrations that, amplified beyond recognition, tell of a utopia (that did not occur), a different course of world history. In this sense, it is probably a twist of fate that Saba Alizadeh befriended Andreas Spechtl, the singer of the band Ja, Panik, in Berlin in 2016, shortly before Spechtl moved to Tehran for some months as part of an artist residency. Andreas Spechtl became famous in the German-speaking world primarily thanks to his song lyrics, in which he deconstructs words in a similarly abstract way as Saba Alizadeh does the music. On If I Ever See You Again, Spechtl and Alizadeh collaborate on the two tracks "Phasing Shadows" and "Touch". Saba Alizadeh also collaborated with electroacoustic sound artist Rojin Sharafi, a native of Iran who now lives in Vienna. With her, Saba composed the track "Hybrid". Not least because of the ongoing pandemic, the two collaborated virtually, exchanging sound tracks over the Internet -- hence the title "Hybrid".
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30M 002CD
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Tehran -- Iran's cultural melting pot with a population of 15 million. There is a broad and lively music scene, about which little is known in the West. In Tehran, traditional music from Baluchistan in the south or Kurdistan in the west meets the hip trends of the metropolis. This Is Tehran? invites you to discover this music scene and marvel at its diversity. From contemporary classical sounds with Saba Alizadeh on the Iranian spiked fiddle Kamanche or Siavash Molaeian together with Kasra Faridi on the piano to the well-known experimental electronic musician Ata "Sote" Ebtekar. The electronic beats of a cooperation of Ehsan Abdipour and Andreas Spechtl stand naturally next to almost jazzy sounds of a Parastoo Ahmadi or Mina Momeni. The Otagh Band invites you to the dark, trip-hop laden "Rotenburg 2020", which they wrote about the cannibal of Rotenburg. This Is Tehran?: a showcase of Iranian music that makes one curious and invites you on a musical journey, as you have certainly not imagined! Also features Hooshyar Khayam & Bamdad Afshar, Pedram Babaiee, and Rojin Sharafi.
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LP
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30M 002LP
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2021 repress; LP version. Tehran -- Iran's cultural melting pot with a population of 15 million. There is a broad and lively music scene, about which little is known in the West. In Tehran, traditional music from Baluchistan in the south or Kurdistan in the west meets the hip trends of the metropolis. This Is Tehran? invites you to discover this music scene and marvel at its diversity. From contemporary classical sounds with Saba Alizadeh on the Iranian spiked fiddle Kamanche or Siavash Molaeian together with Kasra Faridi on the piano to the well-known experimental electronic musician Ata "Sote" Ebtekar. The electronic beats of a cooperation of Ehsan Abdipour and Andreas Spechtl stand naturally next to almost jazzy sounds of a Parastoo Ahmadi or Mina Momeni. The Otagh Band invites you to the dark, trip-hop laden "Rotenburg 2020", which they wrote about the cannibal of Rotenburg. This Is Tehran?: a showcase of Iranian music that makes one curious and invites you on a musical journey, as you have certainly not imagined! Also features Hooshyar Khayam & Bamdad Afshar, Pedram Babaiee, and Rojin Sharafi.
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CD
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30M 001CD
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30M Records is a platform for a new generation of Persian musicians who are connecting provinces and cosmopolitan capitals, Iran and the world outside, tradition and contemporaneity, through their music. The label, created by German music industry veteran and Persia enthusiast, Matthias Koch aims at showcasing emerging Iranian talent to an international audience. "I believe in exchange and communication as a way to bring people closer together. Clear up misunderstandings, if you want. Music, to my mind, can be one of the most powerful tools in this regard." With a focus on musicians who are reviving the country's musical heritage by incorporating centuries old instrumentation and style in modern-day interpretations, production techniques and compositions, 30M Records bridges the gap between traditional and contemporary Iranian music. 30M shines a light on this new and yet overlooked scene of modern Iranian musicians who continue to draw on their past to create avant-garde music. "I believe that modern Iranian music which slowly starts to embrace the traditional musical heritage of the country, is probably one of the coolest music developments to happen in a while," muses Koch. 30M Records will be launched with its first album, Raaz ("Secret"). The project, a collaborative endeavor by musicians Hooshyar Khayam and Bamdad Afshar, aims to shed light on the few remaining artists and keepers of Iranian folk music tradition by incorporating the ancient Baluchi rhythms from the country's south within a mixed-medium frame of electronics, prepared piano, strings and vocal recordings.
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30M 001LP
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LP version. 180 gram vinyl. 30M Records is a platform for a new generation of Persian musicians who are connecting provinces and cosmopolitan capitals, Iran and the world outside, tradition and contemporaneity, through their music. The label, created by German music industry veteran and Persia enthusiast, Matthias Koch aims at showcasing emerging Iranian talent to an international audience. "I believe in exchange and communication as a way to bring people closer together. Clear up misunderstandings, if you want. Music, to my mind, can be one of the most powerful tools in this regard." With a focus on musicians who are reviving the country's musical heritage by incorporating centuries old instrumentation and style in modern-day interpretations, production techniques and compositions, 30M Records bridges the gap between traditional and contemporary Iranian music. 30M shines a light on this new and yet overlooked scene of modern Iranian musicians who continue to draw on their past to create avant-garde music. "I believe that modern Iranian music which slowly starts to embrace the traditional musical heritage of the country, is probably one of the coolest music developments to happen in a while," muses Koch. 30M Records will be launched with its first album, Raaz ("Secret"). The project, a collaborative endeavor by musicians Hooshyar Khayam and Bamdad Afshar, aims to shed light on the few remaining artists and keepers of Iranian folk music tradition by incorporating the ancient Baluchi rhythms from the country's south within a mixed-medium frame of electronics, prepared piano, strings and vocal recordings.
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