For our seventh instalment, Sote, or Ata Ebtekar, one of the most prominent current Iranian composers and sound artists has prepared a mix inspired by Unsound Krakow's mix, SOLIDARITY. This theme will explore how music unites, both on a sonic level via its presence in a physical space or online, as well as culturally and politically, through scenes, collectives and movements.

Sote has produced two of the most exciting albums from the last two years, Sacred Horror In Design (Opal Tapes, 2017) and the most recent Parallel Persia (Diagonal, 2019). Albums where he closely collaborates with traditional musicians such as Arash Bolouri and Behrouz Pashaei. Currently based in Tehran, he is one of the motors behind the vibrant and growing experimental art cultural scene in the country.

For this mix he explains that collaborating with talented musician friends such as Arash Bolouri who plays the santour on ‘Parallel Persia’, Pouya Damadi who plays the tar on ‘Parallel Persia’ and Behrouz Pashaei who played the setar on ‘Sacred Horror In Design’ has been critical to his electro-acoustic works in the past few years. Since these mentioned electro-acoustic projects/albums have been about comradeship, he thought it would be interesting to go back about 10 years when I collaborated with the pianist and composer Mazdak Khamda who is a dear friend from his San Francisco Bay Area days: "And I decided to mix our album ‘Sonic Within’ with additional spectral editing. I feel like this work was overlooked by the media upon its publication and felt right to reintroduce it one more time in this shape and form. I greatly enjoy the balance between the acoustic and the synthetic bits on this material."