Soheil Soheili and Sina Shoaie: Live in Da Theater House, April 2018.

This album is the result of record session during out audiovisual performance with Sina Shoaie and Arman Moghadam in the place of Da Theater House as a Park of Heka music festival. The sound are later mixed and mastered to be released in the form of an album.

Photo credits: Masoumeh Jalalieh

Visual design copyright by Arman Moghadam, all rights reserved.

In a country where youth culture has been heavily restricted for so long, it’s significant when a cultural form such as this has an opportunity to reach a wider audience – aided by the abstract nature of dark ambient, drone and noise. In comparison, the dance music scene has a harder time taking root in Iran due to the illegality of men and women dancing in public together. However, the growth of the experimental electronic scene is going to be about more than a mere novelty reaction to a political paradigm shift. The darkness here is a consequence of the mood of the artists – darker after the country was put on a black list and more restrictions were applied to many things, including monetary transactions to and from Iran. As a consequence, Iranian artists have a great difficulty getting the resources to better develop their projects. Despite this, the enthusiasm and will for Iranian musicians to promote their music shines through.

Re-listening was a set of performances in collaboration between Otaghkar and Cafe-Baz in Tehran. It was announced through an open call. Radio Zirobam helped us with documenting the event and here is the recording from the second sound set with Sina Shoaie and Arman Moghaddam.