Devotion

IDaramad · the opening

The loop was already there

There is a form in Persian classical music called a chaharmezrab. The name means four hammers, after the small mallets a santur player holds between the thumb and two fingers. What it actually is, structurally, is a loop. A short rhythmic cell is fixed underneath and repeated at speed, and the melody above it turns slowly through the mode while the cell never lets go.

I did not set out to combine Persian music with techno. I noticed that one of them had been doing what the other does, several centuries earlier, and already had a word for it.

That is the whole argument of this page, and everything below is the evidence for it. Not a fusion, not a blend, not one tradition borrowing the surface of another. Two musics that arrived independently at the same discovery: that repetition, held past the point where the ear stops counting, stops sounding like repetition and starts dissolving the listener's sense of time. One found it in Tehran and one found it in Detroit and Berlin, and both were right.

IIThe reed

Everything here begins with a cut

The Masnavi of Rumi, roughly twenty five thousand couplets composed between 1258 and 1273, opens not with God and not with the poet but with a musical instrument. The first eighteen lines are among the most examined passages in Persian literature, and Rumi is said to have considered them the key to the entire work.

Listen to this reed how it complains, telling a tale of separations.

Rumi · Masnavi, book one, line one · Nicholson

The ney is an end blown reed flute. It cries, Rumi says, because it was cut from the reed bed where it grew, and its music is nothing but the sound of that severance. Then he widens it: everyone taken far from their origin spends the rest of their life wanting that time back. And then he sharpens it, in case anyone mistook the poem for something gentle. The sound of the reed is fire, not wind, and whoever lacks that fire had better not bother.

I am not borrowing that as a metaphor. For anyone making Persian music a very long way from Iran, separation is not an image to reach for. It is simply the address the work is written from. The tradition worked this out first and put it in the opening line, which is a kind of instruction: whatever else you do, do not pretend the distance is not the subject.

IIIThe radif

A decade of self devotion

Persian classical music is not a body of pieces. It is a body of material, called the radif, and UNESCO inscribed it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009. More than two hundred and fifty melodic units, each called a gusheh, arranged into cycles, set against an underlying modal layer. The whole thing was passed from master to disciple by ear, never primarily on paper, and its modern shape was fixed by Mirza Abdollah, who died in 1918, and the players around him.

Those cycles sit inside twelve modal systems. Seven of them are dastgah and five are avaz, shorter forms derived from them.

• Shur
• Segah
• Chahargah
• Mahur
• Homayun
• Nava
• Rast-Panjgah
• Abu Ata
• Bayat-e Tork
• Afshari
• Dashti
• Bayat-e Esfahan

The important part is what the radif is for. You do not perform it. You absorb it until it is under your hands, and then you improvise from inside it. UNESCO's own description of the apprenticeship is unusually blunt for a heritage listing, and it is the reason this page is called what it is called.

Learning stretches over at least a decade of self devotion, a process of musical asceticism intended to open the gates of spirituality.

UNESCO · Radif of Iranian music · inscribed 2009

Any producer who has spent ten years building a library, learning a room, and getting a kick to sit correctly will recognise the shape of that description exactly. The relationship a musician has to the radif is the relationship a producer has to their own hands: years of accumulation so that the moment of making can be unhesitating.

IVFour hammers

An ostinato is a loop with better manners

Back to the chaharmezrab, because it is the strongest evidence there is. It is a fast, metric, virtuosic form built on an ostinato: a fixed cell, repeated, while melodic material develops over it. It is composed for a specific dastgah, often for a specific gusheh within it, and despite the four in its name it turns up comfortably in six eight. Faramarz Payvar, who died in 2009, is the composer most associated with the modern santur repertoire of them.

Now describe a deep techno track using only that sentence and see how little you have to change. A fixed cell, repeated, while material develops over it, composed for a specific mode, often in an unexpected metre.

The two forms even fail in the same way. A weak chaharmezrab is one where the ostinato is merely fast, and a weak techno track is one where the loop is merely long. Both are asking the same thing of a player: hold something absolutely still for long enough that a very small change becomes enormous. A filter opening one turn over sixteen bars and a gusheh shifting to a neighbouring tetrachord are the same event.

And both are musics of duration rather than arrival. A dastgah performance can run for an hour, moving the listener slowly through modal space with no destination announced. A deep house set does that with a different vocabulary. Neither is trying to get anywhere. Both are trying to dissolve the sense that there is anywhere to get to.

VTom and bak

The drum that already thinks in kick and hat

The tombak, also called the zarb, is a goblet drum carved from walnut or mulberry with a goatskin head. Its name is onomatopoeia for its own two central strokes. Tom is the bass tone, struck at the centre of the head. Bak is the bright treble, struck at the rim by dropping the hand from the wrist so the ring finger catches the edge.

Low at the centre, high at the rim. That is a kick and a hat, and a Persian drum has been named after that pairing for as long as it has had a name.

It goes further than the name. The standard notation, which came from Ostad Abolhassan Saba and reached print in Hosein Tehrani's teaching method, writes the instrument on three lines: tom on the bottom, meyaneh in the middle, bak on top. Low, body, high. That is a drum machine grid, drawn by hand in Tehran decades before anyone in Iran was likely to own one. Putting a tombak over a four to the floor is not a fusion of anything. It is two people who already speak the same language finally being put in the same room.

Then there is the part no machine gets. The riz is a roll produced by loose fingers driven from the wrist, and played properly you cannot hear the individual strokes at all. There is no sample of a riz that is still alive on the twentieth repeat, which is exactly why the player stays in the room.

VIThe friction

The notes between the notes

Here is the difficulty, stated plainly rather than smoothed over, because it is the point where most records of this kind quietly fail.

Persian modes use intervals that fall between the keys of a piano. A koron lowers a note by roughly a quarter tone and a sori raises it by roughly the same. Segah and Chahargah are built on those intervals. Without them, those modes are not those modes. They are just melancholy major scales wearing a costume.

A synthesiser tuned to twelve equal steps cannot play them. So there are two honest answers and one dishonest one. You can retune the synthesiser to the mode. You can let the acoustic instrument hold the microtones while the electronics hold only the things that do not fight it, the grid, the drones, the low end, staying out of the way harmonically. Or you can round every Persian interval to the nearest piano key, which is the dishonest one, and it is what most fusion records do, and it is precisely why they end up sounding like a postcard of a place rather than the place.

Where the tuning cannot be reconciled, the synthesiser is the one that yields. The mode is older and it is right.

VIIThe instruments

What each one is actually for

Not a catalogue. Every one of these is here because it does a job the electronics cannot, and if it stops doing that job it comes out of the track.

Ney end blown reed

The oldest voice here and the one carrying the subject. Blown between the teeth in Persian practice, which is why it breathes and cracks rather than sounding pure. It is the instrument Rumi handed the entire theme of separation to.

Tar long necked lute

A double bowl body carved from mulberry, faced with lambskin, six strings in three courses, struck with a small brass plectrum set in wax. The reference sound of the whole tradition, and the instrument the radif is most often taught on.

Setar long necked lute

Quiet, plucked with the nail of the index finger, and named for three strings although it has carried four for centuries. Historically the instrument of solitary practice and of dervishes: an instrument you play for yourself rather than for a room. That quietness is not a limitation. It asks for a close microphone and it repays one.

Santur hammered zither

Seventy two strings in courses of four, struck with feather weight wooden mallets. Its decay is short and bright, which is exactly why it works as a rhythmic engine rather than as a pad. This is the instrument the loop came from.

Kamanche spike fiddle

A small spherical body with a skin membrane, played upright on its spike, and the instrument turns against the bow rather than the bow travelling across it. The most vocal of them, and the one that carries tahrir, the ornamental break that Persian singing is built on.

Daf frame drum

A large frame with metal rings set inside it, so a single stroke arrives with a wash behind it. The sound of a room full of people rather than one player, and the closest thing the tradition has to a reverb send.

Tombak goblet drum

Covered above. The engine.

VIIIThe interruption

What happened to the music

None of this arrives intact. After 1979, music in Iran was heavily restricted: performance and broadcast were curtailed for years, and women are still barred from singing solo before a mixed audience. An enormous amount of Iranian musical life went in one of two directions, underground or abroad. Los Angeles absorbed so much of the second that the diaspora named it Tehrangeles.

What grew underground is the part that matters here. Electronic music in Iran developed in private, at gatherings in villas, in the hills outside the city, in the desert, assembled by people who could not advertise. In 2014 Nesa Azadikhah founded Deep House Tehran, which became the principal platform for that scene and carried it outward.

Its own description is worth the space: the leading Iranian underground house and electronic music magazine, running mixes, interviews and workshops. That is not a label imprint or a club night. It is an institution, built for a scene that could not advertise, by people who had every reason not to build one.

So this record is not an experiment in putting two things together. It is a continuation of something Iranian musicians have been doing, mostly out of sight and often at real cost, for decades. The only unusual thing about doing it from here is the distance, and the distance was already the subject.

IXThe method

Four rules, and they are not negotiable

1. The mode leads. The dastgah is chosen first and the electronics are built to fit it. Never the reverse. A track that starts with a groove and has a Persian scale fitted over it afterwards is a groove with decoration on it, and it always sounds like one.
2. The acoustic instrument keeps its tuning. If the synthesiser cannot meet the koron, the synthesiser moves to drones and percussion and stays out of the harmony.
3. Repetition is the subject. Not a bed, not a backing, not a holding pattern waiting for an event to arrive. If a section only exists to lead somewhere, it does not exist.
4. Nothing is here because it sounds exotic. Every Persian element has to be doing structural work. The test is simple: take it out. If the track is merely less flavoured, it was decoration. If the track stops working, it stays.

XCoda

The long devotion

The radif takes at least ten years to learn, and the people who describe that apprenticeship reach, without any prompting, for the word devotion. There is a track on this record with that name. It was titled before I read the UNESCO entry, which felt less like a coincidence than like confirmation.

Both of these musics ask the same thing of a listener, and it is an unusual thing to ask. Give me longer than you think this needs. Stop waiting for the next event. Let the repetition go on past the point where you are still counting it, and something in the room will come loose.

Nothing happens. It happens for a very long time. That is not a shortcoming of the music. It is the mechanism, and it is a very old one.