Sote (Iran) w/ Anna Peaker and Lacrima

Very excited to announce the return of legendary Iranian experimental musician Ata Ebtekar to The Lubber

Ata Ebtekar, better known as Sote, is an electronic music composer and sound artist based in Tehran, Iran. His wide-ranging love of rich sounds and textures is embodied in diverse paths such as hardcore club sounds, collaborations that straddle (traditional) acoustic and electronic instrumentation, and solo experimental electronics – making Ebtekar equally at home in concert halls, galleries, or clubs. Over the last three decades, he has released on labels such as Warp, Diagonal, SVBKVLT, Sub Rosa, Morphine, and Opal Tapes.

Ebtekar’s compositions and installations weave expansive sonic tales that exhibit a strong engagement with electro-acoustic techniques, sound design, microtonal systems, and polyrhythmic motifs. His vivid soundscapes employ various synthesis strategies and DSP techniques, both in analogue and digital environments. Much of his output deals with a continual exploration of abstract musical form as a commentary and reflection on current social and political experiences, mental states, and the human condition. His music challenges the listener with mutating sonic movements that contrast moments of fleeting melodic beauty and deep emotion with painful dissonance and abrasive noise. On his latest album Ministry of Tall Tales, out in February 2024 on SVBKVLT, Sote has further intensified this compositional approach in an attempt to process the immense amount of frustration, anger, confusion, helplessness and fear he went through in the recent years because of what has been happening in his surroundings and in Iran’s sociopolitical system. Consequently, he describes the album’s all-synthesis based music as an equally dark, melodic, and noise-driven contemplation on corruption, oppression and murder. Sote (aka Ata Ebtekar) ratchets up the intensity of his relentlessly maximalist computer music with Sound System Persepolis, his most intense album yet, made to move the body and stimulate the brain.

His latest album, Sound System Persepolis is a futuristic hardcore album of pummellingly rhythmic and harmonically complex computer music, which takes its name from Persepolis: the beating heart and administrative centre of the historical Persian Empire. Even at low volumes the harmonics, rhythmic textures and buffeting decay conjure the sense of a monumental rig (as featured on the album artwork) playing at earth-shaking volume, capable of displacing huge volumes of air, yet with barely a kick or a snare in sight. "I think it's lazy to just be moving around hi-hats and kicks these days," Ebtekar explains. "That's not going to be unique music. I'm interested in getting to the feeling that a kick and a snare give to you, via the possibilities of pitched and structured patterns of tones and harmonics."

w/

Anna Peaker
Leeds based experimental music maker
https://annapeaker.bandcamp.co...

Lacrima
Opal Tapes savant Stephen Bishop
https://opaltapes.bandcamp.com...
https://opaltapes.bandcamp.com...