Anyone attempting to meld two seemingly disparate elements like this have set themselves up for hard work. A western musician, perhaps admiring the sounds and moods evoked by Persian instruments, would easily fail at the task. It takes someone truly steeped in the sounds of a land while embracing the new, strange and foreign to create a work as stunning as Parallel Persia.
It can appear as if electronic music emanates only from North America, Europe and Asia with contributions from neighboring regions and countries. This gives the impression there is nothing of interest happening elsewhere. The more curious listener, however, knows this is not true. There are vibrant, thriving electronic music communities with many artists all over the world. And it is from Tehran, Iran that Sote emerges.
Sote, the nom de synth of Ata Ebtekar, produces electronic music with its feet firmly in two camps: traditional Middle Eastern music and modern electronic music. Sote’s skill and proficiency allows them to create a music with a recognizable Middle Eastern root that engages listeners more used to traditional western approaches in new, intriguing ways.
Parallel Persia is a collection of seven varied and fascinating tracks. “Modality Transporter” welds traditional tar playing with deep FM-synthesized sweeps for a slowly building, meditative opening track. “Brass Tacks” continues this path, expanding with deep, thudding percussion and vocoded mantras and phrases, building into something like Autechre crossed with orchestral sounds. “Atomic Hypocrisy” is a challenging listening befitting its name; the listener who follows this track through all eight minutes of its entirety is one of great fortitude; the digital textures created herein forge something brittle, defiant, unwieldy and overpowering. “Trans Force” returns to more Middle Eastern instrumentation and arrangements mixed with digital manipulated sounds and samples in a winding, sprawling and airy track. “Pipe Dreams” is the closest one gets to a traditional track on Parallel Persia, with its thudding kick drum beat anchoring a rough melody to the swirling, boiling synthetic sounds and rhythmic chanting. The arrangement of “Alpha Terrain of Disease” seems to hang the constituent elements in midair like some sort of mobile sculpture, metallic textures clashing and sometimes colliding with reverb-drenched dulcimer tones. “Pseudo Scholastic” wraps up the album with a cerebral meditation for FM synthesis and tar where percussive synthesized tones ramble and sway like a drunkard through alleys of the dark night.
Parallel Persia will challenge the listener in the best possible way—as it should. Anyone attempting to meld two seemingly disparate elements like this have set themselves up for hard work. A western musician, perhaps admiring the sounds and moods evoked by Persian instruments, would easily fail at the task. It takes someone truly steeped in the sounds of a land while embracing the new, strange and foreign to create a work as stunning as Parallel Persia.
Parallel Persia is available on Diagonal.
