Ata Ebtekar / Sote – Picture Of A Whisper (2006)

From the double CD Persian Electronic Music: Yesterday and Today 1966-2006 by Alireza Mashayekhi and Ata Ebtekar / Sote ‎. Electronic music composed in Iran from the Sixties till today by two Iranian music masters.

CD1 is compositions by Alireza Mashayekhi and CD2 is compositions by Ata Ebtekar/Sote .

Ebtekar, who has been schooled and raised in a world that initially embraced the West only to reject it, has been on both sides of the post-structuralist divide; his notion of deconstruction, which happened literally in Iran, is experientially cultural rather than theoretically academic. Therefore, his questions about sound and the ancestral music of his culture have to be looked at through that split prism. Being a recording engineer as well as a composer and sound artist, his source materials were the old Persian scales themselves. He actually goes to town altering their modal framework and time signatures, compressing and stretching them, and in some cases turning them inside out. What remains however, is the actual “Persian-ness” of it all. It is unmistakably Middle Eastern, no matter how much he shifts modalities or even alters melodic constructs between or through scales or manipulates sound and dynamic tensions. It sounds like history and feels like history, but is so unmistakably “new” that it makes history, and it is strange and beguiling enough to make you completely question what you are hearing. [source]

Performed by Sote (Ata Ebtekar), electronic composer, sound artist and recording engineer who was born in Iran on September 2nd, 1972, educated in Germany and now living in America.



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