Sote — Dastgaah

Here we have unique release of electronic artist Akta Ebtekar, an Iranian musician that lived in San Francisco and released some stuff on the infamous Warp label. This would be a good start to get an idea of the music of Sote as it's situated in the outer fringes of what you can find in the catalogue of that label, where they would start bordering on abstract electronic music. But that's just a start.

Ektebar moved back to Iran where he constructed Dastgaah, reportedly quite a leap from earlier works and not in the least because it incorporates the old Persian modal system of dastgah (don't know about the extra 'a', but that's probably a romanization issue), which is a system of constructing the traditional music of the area. Radically different than the Western systems with one of the feats being the use of microtonality. I don't know very much about it, apart from it being very complex, but I'm sure the internet can provide more info if your interest is piqued. Overhere, for starters. Luckily it's not necessary to know all this to appreciate what Ektebar does, but this isn't a very common startingpoint, so as one would expect his album Dastgaah quite a unique musical experience.

The first of the eleven untitled tracks starts with swirls of sped up santur melodies, just be be brutally disrupted by heavy thuds of bass. The second is more melancholic and one of the easier ones to grasp. Over the album you'd find melodies, often buried in all kinds of electronic sounds. To find your way, to recognize the hidden melodies, takes a few spins, but in the end it pays off I think. The fifth track is more a textural, almost drone-like, piece. Quite scary at times, just like the piece after it, which is quite haunting with the somewhat neurotic buzzing melodies and the upwards floating clouds of sound far away. The building stones of the eighth track seem to be the framedrum and ghostly vocal noises that seem to come directly from the world of the 'jinn'. Over the album you'd find some sounds that seem familiar, as their archetypes in different times have been Persian instruments like tar, kamanche, barbat and daf.

A very intrigueing release which may not completely convince on all counts just yet, but still something to lend an ear to if you're the musically adventurous type. It's much more exciting than your average 'beat'-ridden worldmusic release. This certainly wasn't what I expected yet I kept returning to it and it's still growing on me. The great artwork tops it off perfectly.