Disquiet

The biggest surprise in the music of Alireza Mashayekhi is that it hadn’t long ago planted itself in the sample repositories of illbient, dubstep, and adventurous hip-hop DJs. Last year the Sub Rosa label released Persian Electronic Music: Yesterday and Today 1966-2006, a two-CD collection that focused on Mashayekhi’s recordings and those of Ata Ebtekar aka Sote. A few Mashayekhi tracks are part of a recent podcast from Resonance FM (MP3) and those pieces reveal Mashayekhi, born in 1940, as exactly the sort of musician the collective subconscious of electronic music wished existed. He melds the lessons of 20th-century Western classical forms (especially the emphasis on tonality) with Middle Eastern modal music and digital media. The result is an aural color field blending familiar elements that are rarely heard together. More info at resonancefm.com and at subrosa.net. (Also included in the podcast entry is an interview with artist Anahita Rezvani Paraava.)

By Marc Weidenbaum