Author: Mahdyar

Cinna Peyghamy is a composer and sound artist, born in France from Iranian parents.

His debut album ‘Gamut’ released in 2017 under the moniker Cikkun, soon followed by the EP ‘Injonctions’. Both showcased a unique turn on EDM and bass music’s standard as the young producer started to implement what would define his sound : fragmented rhythms, severe pattern seizure, abrasive melodies and abyssal mood swings.

Born within the parisian experimental/noise scene, his live act gravited more and more towards full-on improvisations with self-made sound devices : true to his scientific and programming background, Cinna Peyghamy creates and designs unique instruments, from DIY synthesizers and soundboxes to motor-based mechanical structures that serves as tools for his compositions, performances and sound installations.

Leaving his alias and performing under his full name since 2019, his recent work focuses on blending the boundaries between acoustic and electronic instruments.

The tombak, a traditional persian percussion, is enhanced by the sonic possibilities of the modular synthesizer. Cinna leads the dialogue between these two sonic entities and explores the never-ending improvisation field created by this hybrid setup.

His work has been shown in numerous festivals such as Nuits Sonores, Switch Festival, Propagations,Archipel, Bruits Blancs, Nuit Blanche Paris, Tehran Contemporary Sound…

Ata Ebtekar, better known as Sote, is an electronic music composer and sound artist based in Tehran, Iran. His wide-ranging love of rich sounds and textures is embodied in diverse paths such as hardcore club sounds, collaborations that straddle (traditional) acoustic and electronic instrumentation, and solo experimental electronics – making Ebtekar equally at home in concert halls, galleries, or clubs. Over the last two decades, he has released on labels such as Warp, Sub Rosa, Morphine,Diagonal, and Opal Tapes.

Ebtekar’s compositions and installations weave expansive sonic tales that exhibit a strong engagement with electro-acoustic techniques, sound design, microtonal systems, and polyrhythmic motifs. His vivid soundscapes employ various synthesis strategies and DSP techniques, both in analogue and digital environments. Much of his output deals with a continual exploration of a relentlessly maximalist aesthetic – as heard on a record like Hardcore Sounds from Tehran, which was listed on The Quietus’ Top 100 albums of 2016, and saw Sote re-invent high-energy banging hardcore by twisting it into challenging rhythmic and sonic structures.

Ata Ebtekar composes music with a deeply-held conviction that rules and formulas should be deconstructed and rethought. A pivotal figure of the electronic music scene in the Middle East, he alters musical modal codes from their original tonality and rhythmic tradition to achieve vivid synthetic soundscapes.

Many of his daring compositions revisit traditional musical material and playing techniques and subject them to digital manipulations to achieve radically contemporary forms that range from the delicate to the abrasive, and display a unique ability to convey intense yet contrasting emotions. His acclaimed electro-acoustic albums Sacred Horror in Design (2017) and Parallel Persia (2019) are testament to Sote’s unique capacity as a composer with both acoustic instrumentation and synthetic material.

2020 saw the release of the 5-track album Moscels (Opal Tapes), described by Boomkat as »daringly iconoclastic and ravishingly future-curious.« Though the pandemic might have somewhat muted the attention for this marvellous release, Sote continued his work relentlessly, creating new material along the vein of Hardcore Sounds from Tehran, plus launching into work on another album, the harmonically maximalist and symphonic-synthetic Majestic Noise Made in Beautiful Rotten Iran, released in March 2022 on Sub Rosa with an accompanying live AV show created with acclaimed visual composer Tarik Barri.

A driving force behind Tehran’s vibrant electronic music scene, Ebtekar is founder of Zabte Sote, a sub-label of Opal Tapes focusing on Iranian electronic composers, as well as co-founder of the SET Festival in Tehran. He is always on the lookout for new challenges or commissions that invite forays into new creative territories.

The mysterious “Closer“ opens up a cinematic dystopia, it begins the story of protagonist Negisa. Her vocals are distorted, pitched and chopped, even the samples for bass, beats and percussion are handmade – or voice-made, respectively – and accompanied byelectronic sound design.

In this futuristic universe, one gets lost in wondrous ways: indisturbing soundscapes, gloomy arthouse hallways and reflective echo chambers. Butthen a warming voice rises in an all-embracing chorus, like aurora after a dark night Overte arctic ice desert.“SOMA” EP was created by Negisa Blumenstein and Luis Schwamm. It narrates a story about psyche, corporeality and gender.

The music’s tension is almost palpable, the real horror arises from interpersonal relationships. Living out one’s emotions is viewed as an act of empowerment for all genders and therefore celebrated.

Negisa sheds light on stereotypes as often found in horror and thriller genre, just to rearrange them. The woman* now raises her voice – and in this process becomes a threat herself.

Isabelle Finou is a performance artist, singer and composer. She was born in Wroclaw, Poland in 1988 and emigrated to Germany in 1998. She studied popular music (MA) Folkwang University of the Arts, performance / scenic arts (MA) RUB, media arts at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and philosophy / literature (BA) HHU.

Her work spans a variety of genres in which she creates scenic pieces, memoirs, installations, performances, as well as love pieces for the stage and the public space.

Her artistic field of research deals with the sensitivity and vulnerability of the individual in social and digital transformative processes.

She understands the human body as a resonance cavity for sounds and noises in which the sending out of one’s voice into space becomes a political act.

In the created sound spaces, sounds and voices pass through and synaptically experience the body and world. In the spherical spaces moments of extended and intensified reality and emotionality arise.

Finou’s partly subtle but intense and often demanding pieces move in the field of contemporary composition & performance art and arrange the tonal / atonal effect of voices, places, memories, symbolic ideas and entities.

In doing so, they reveal themes of mode of existence – of entities and bodies – ideas of utopian and current forms of being and describe the state of different worlds with a tonal unpredictability of the form.