SOTE
Sound System Persepolis (Diagonal)
Ata Ebtekar has been making music as Sote for over 20 years, with his debut single from 2002 Electric Deaf retaining some notoriety to this day for being mastered at a horse-scaringly loud volume. A new phase of his career as a producer of electronic music perhaps began, though, with his 2016 album Hardcore Sounds From Tehran. A document of various live performances in Iran’s capital city, where Ebtekar had recently set up home and remains to this day, it combined his skill for complex, shatteringly crisp, pummelling rhythms with Middle Eastern tunings and melodies.
This conceptual marriage has been referenced and expanded on subsequent Sote releases, including his exhilarating latest, Sound System Persepolis – whose title is a typical Ebtekar splice of Iranian heritage and club culture. Comprising five tracks in a little under half an hour (though billed as an album), it’s very much a beat-based suite but is zealous in its efforts to do non-obvious things with those beats, as opposed to hitting ravers’ established pleasure points.
Regardless, listeners who enjoy the music of IDM A-listers like Aphex Twin or Autechre; the polyrhthmic drum workouts found on the Nyege Nyege Tapes label; or even the more grandiose fringes of 20th-century classical music may delight in these intricate computerised constructions.
words NOEL GARDNER
