Ata Ebtekar’s biography complicates the narratives the West likes to tell itself about ideas of freedom, progress, and the relationships between center and margins, modernity and tradition. Born in Hamburg but raised in Iran, Ebtekar moved with his parents back to Germany when he was 11, after the onset of the Iran-Iraq war; at 17, he moved to the Bay Area, where he studied audio engineering, taught courses in digital audio, and, under the alias Sote, recorded mind-melting electronic music for labels like Warp. Eventually, however, he chose Iran. Four years ago, at 41, he moved with his own family back to Tehran. There, he teaches computer music and sound design and is at the center of a small but vital scene of artists making bold, original electronic music.
Their success is a testament to their resourcefulness. The hurdles to creating experimental music in Iran are real, from the difficulty in securing venues to the scant availability of gear or recordings. (In a recent interview, Ebtekar noted that he can’t even buy music from iTunes: If he were to log in to an American bank account from Iran, U.S. authorities could freeze his assets here.) At the same time, this community’s dedication to avant-garde music with no overt social message challenges many Western assumptions about “political” expression in a so-called closed society. They get by as best they can, basically—not unlike their peers in the West, caught between capital and their own less-than-ideal political situation.
Ebtekar’s music has always been intense. His Electric Deaf 12”, from 2002, remains one of the heaviest records in Warp’s catalog: Pummeling breakcore run through scabrous distortion, it suggests Aphex Twin or Squarepusher being blasted with an anti-matter ray. Over the years, however, he has focused his approach less upon heaviness than slipperiness, emphasizing microtonal frequencies, electro-acoustic techniques, and the kinds of granular textures and head-spinning polyrhythms employed by Autechre. His 2014 album Architectonic, for Rabih Beaini’s Morphine label, is an answer to the question, “What would techno sound like without conventional percussive sounds?” Its shuddering, clanging pulses suggest magnetic fields colliding, and freezing rain skittering across windshields.
But Ebtekar’s far-out futurism is balanced by an equal interest in the past. A significant proportion of his catalog—particularly 2006’s Dastgaah, 2007’s Persian Electronic Music: Yesterday and Today (1966-2006), and 2009’s Ornamentalism—has been dedicated to fusing electronic processes with traditional Persian music. He takes up those ideas with renewed vigor on Sacred Horror in Design, applying his customary digital processing to traditional Persian instruments like the santour, a kind of hammered dulcimer, and the setar, a long-necked, four-stringed lute.
It is an immediately appealing blend. The album opens with “Flux of Sorrow,” in which plucked and struck strings dance within vast fields of reverb. As the music progresses, it seems to toggle between the “real,” physical world of force and resistance and a funhouse-mirror digital universe where hard edges and straight lines melt into pliable sheets of sound. “Boghze Esfahan” begins with quiet acoustic figures but quickly turns deeply strange, as string sounds morph into buzzing bell tones, icy clinks, and evil wheezing. In “Plural,” galloping setar is fed into a whirling vortex of rising pitches, suggesting a cassette player about to go supernova. Essentially a trio record with Arash Bolouri (santour) and Behrouz Pashaei (setar), the album exists in a strange and provocative limbo in which Ebtekar’s collaborators’ spare melodic riffs and dazzling instrumental runs wear an eerie electronic halo, and played rhythms spark intricate algorithmic patterns.
There are risks inherent in the project, in no small part because the sounds at the record’s core come coded with such specific sets of assumptions—for Iranian listeners, they’re overwhelmingly traditional, while Westerners will find them exotic by default. Additionally, Ebtekar has worked within traditional Persian scale systems, which lends the music a modal feel that’s a world away from Western music. But what makes the record so successful is how thoroughly Ebtekar has managed to integrate the two sound worlds. Using a fluid, almost narrative sense of arrangement along with his heavily abstracted sound design, he fashions a third way between his influences’ two opposing poles. In a recent interview, Ebtekar explained his concept of what he calls “The Other Sound” as an attempt to “reshape and deconstruct familiar concepts into untried forms to challenge the system.” Sacred Horror in Design does that: Simultaneously honoring traditional musical forms and exploring the far edge of sonic expression, he brings his “Other Sound” flickering to life in a virtual space beyond borders.
