Music from Iran

Portrait CD of the Iranian composer Elnaz Seyedi: five works for duo, trio and ensemble, played by the Zöllner-Roche Duo, Alice Belugou and David Eggert, Trio Aventure, Ensemble Musikfabrik and the Kommas Ensemble, plus two online videos.

Portrait CD of the Iranian-born composer Farzia Fallah: five works from solo violin to nonet, played by Benedikt Bindewald, the guitar duo Henrik Dewes and Tobias Klich, Sonar Quartett, Ensemble DEHIO and Ensemble Aventure.

*150 copies limited edition* Originally released in 2014 on cassette and digital only, Till Human Voices Wake Us was the first album by the Iranian artist on Umor Rex. It became a key work in our catalog, and now, 12 years later, it is available on vinyl for the first time. This is the first in a series of four special, limited reissues to be released in 2026 to mark the 20th anniversary of Umor Rex. Till Human Voices Wake Us comprises ten tracks with a clear and carefully structured script, bas…

On Rituals of The Last Dawn, Saba Alizadeh draws Persian classical memory into long‑form electro‑acoustic rites, two side‑long pieces that breathe like prayers for a wounded world - hushed, spacious, and quietly defiant.

*60 copies limited edition* This album is like a mirror in which disappearances and vanishing happen quietly and unobtrusively, a place where reality and fantasy intertwine and the boundary between life and death becomes an endless blur. A place where realities gradually fade away, making room for new truths, and time becomes merely an echo of what unfolds deep within existence. Nahal Kavand is a multidisciplinary sound artist based in Tehran. She uses field recordings and ambient sounds to crea…

*2026 repress* On his debut album “Scattered Memories”, the composer, musician and true master on the Iranian spike fiddle kamancheh Saba Alizadeh blends his instrumental virtuosity with spherical electronics, samples of Persian music instruments and field recordings from his hometown Tehran. Born in Tehran in 1983 as son of the world renowned Tar and Setar virtuoso Hossein Alizadeh, Saba Alizadeh studied the Iranian spike fiddle with Saeed Farajpoury and Keyhan Kalhor plus photography and later…

"What remains after mutilating and reassembling an essential historical recording? How is it connected to a particular event in a grotesque and cyclical novella riddled with medical procedures of an aesthetic and deforming nature? Malakoot – this spiral, centres on a decision made one afternoon by a character. On a similar afternoon, full of anxiety, pressed by an unknowable presence in this city , I decided that the soundscape for such an inspiring work of fiction was a mutilated one; things co…

Eremos is a Greek adjective meaning uninhabited, desert, or remote, but “the important thing for me is 'uninhabited',” says Iranian sound artist Siavash Amini, explaining the title of his new LP. For over a decade, Amini has crafted tight, detailed sound pieces drawing from electronic music, electroacoustic experimentation, and classical music traditions, working in solo and group configurations – see collaborations with Iranian duo 9T Antiope, American scholar and poet Eugene Thacker, French am…

To understand tuning systems, to peer into the infinity of microtonal compositional strategies, is to imagine a sense of musicality that extends far out beyond the familiar harmonies of the western ear. Iranian composer Siavash Amini, a self-confessed tuning obsessive, has dedicated much of his musical investigations over the past half decade to unlocking new relationships between harmonic events. Moreover, he has sought new timbral relations too and in doing so has honed a particular sonic-aest…

Big Tip! In process of stocking Composer and sound artist Siavash Amini collaborates with author Eugene Thacker on Songs for Sad Poets. The collection of eight pieces draws its inspiration from the legacy of the so-called cursed poets (»poètes maudits«) as well as the German-language tradition of song cycles and expands the structure of the classic art song through a process of lyric abstraction. Amini is no stranger to interdisciplinary collaboration, as seen in »A Mimesis of Nothingness,« hi…

Room40 presents A Trail of Laughters by Siavash Amini. A series of distressing dreams started this whole thing. A few years ago someone pointed out that my repeating dreams of being lost in what seemed to be a maze of pits, reminded them of stories about wonders of wells and pits in the Book of Marvels. More than a year ago I started having those dreams again, so I read the book. There were similarities with a few of the stories but nothing more. One of the stories made an impression on me more …

Siavash Amini returns to Hallow Ground with "A Mimesis of Nothingness", his fourth album for the Swiss label. Following up on "Harmistice" together with fellow Iranian artists 9T Antiope, the six tracks were conceived in close collaboration with another artist and see the prolific composer intensify his interdisciplinary approach. The six tracks enter a dialogue with the photographs of Nooshin Shafiee, an acclaimed artist whose work capturing their hometown Tehran becomes the starting point for …

Edition of 300, white vinyl. 9T Antiope have made a name for themselves in the vibrant experimental music scene of Iran over the past years. Now based in Paris, Sara Bigdeli Shamloo and Nima Aghiani are expanding their stylistic scope and team up with long-time friend Siavash Amini for their debut release on Hallow Ground. After 2017’s »TAR« and »FORAS« the year after 2018, »Harmistice« is Amini’s third LP for Hallow Ground and his first in collaboration with other artists. Recorded in Paris and…