In Session: Sepehr

You’re about to release ‘Pomegranate Skies’, which includes themes of split identity, duality, heaven and hell – can you talk us through those influences and how they informed the music?

The identities thing is something I’ve always been grappling with my entire life. I feel like since I started doing my record label [Shaytoon Records] I started taking more agency of that concept, of my own split identity between who I am as an Iranian-American person, who’s always split between worlds. The label is focusing on highlighting diaspora artists and underground with the specific purpose of not tokenising it, and being more of a statement of the fact that diaspora artists from the SWANA region, the Middle East, whatever you want to call it, are deserving of a seat at the table for the general market of the club world. That’s how it started to sprout conceptually, and now I’ve just been trying to hone in on that more, and create an entire ecosystem of music which is split dualities constantlly, and never just honing in on one area. I felt like the perfect representation of that chaotic in-between is the type of music that I make.

Growing up, I actually went to an Iranian church which is really rare, because most Iranians either come from a Muslim background or they’re not religious at all since leaving Iran or being in the diaspora. I went through a very interesting Christianity phase when I was very young. I guess those themes of heaven and hell are really meaningful to me because they represent a lot of trauma that I went through. This album is like an amalgamation of using different themes from my own split identity that inform what the music sounds like.

I’m trying to continually evolve and create. I’m recontextualising different parts of my identity to inform an entire ecosystem of sonics. Represent the transitional, the liminal, the in-between identities. Using themes of heaven, hell, spirituality, in a cheeky way, in order to recontextualise one’s identity, to be able to mould it to whatever you want.

I’m trying to create something that goes against the grain of what people typically do in the club world, which is ‘I need to put out this record that sounds exactly like this so that I can get booked at this club, play these parties’. I’m trying to set a precedent where it’s like: no, we’re all in this in-between phase, this in-between place of this moment in time, and the music should reflect that. It should take pieces of everything that you feel and make it all one big sonic mess, so that it doesn’t follow something and so that it represents the liminal, in-between space, that you actually represent.

What do you think the contrasting sounds in the album are and what’s the effect of bringing those together?

It’s definitely an amalgamation of every sort of influence I’ve touched on since I’ve started being enveloped in the world of electronic music. I definitely took influence from the San Francisco experimental scene, people like Carlos Souffront, Solar, Tyrel Williams, that were showing me very strange records that were acid-tinged, obscure, industrial-adjacent, that just had the weirdest samples in it. There’s some of the new wave of bass-y, percussive stuff that’s sort of the ‘big sound’ right now, minus cheesy elements that I tend to hear all the time that are super wonky and remind me of big room tech-house, which I’m trying to avoid. When I was growing up, I was into progressive and trance because my cousins would play weird CDs while we’d be playing computer games, there’s a little bit of that. And also Boards of Canada influence is in there too, there’s elements of Coil all over it, but that’s just my production in general because I worship them. There’s just a shitload of sounds on this record. I wanted to make it that way on purpose, and in fact I want most of my albums under the name Sepehr to be like that. I want to continually set a precedent for people to start making diversification of their sound the norm. In albums, club nights. That’s why I’m trying to get all these influences in there.

The release notes also say “The music in this album is a reflection of the ever-constant existential chaos in his mind” — what effect does artistic expression have on this for you?

On a personal level, making music is a meditative process that helps me with existential dread — that I have lots of. And I suspect that many people do, but they don’t ever talk about it as much, because now all of us are just following the highlight reel of Instagram and pretending to be personas of themselves that they’re not. I know deep down that everybody is kind of sensing and feeling existential dread because of this. I wanted that to be a statement on this record. I want to bring back conceptual albums to the dance music forefront, where we’re talking about uncomfrotable topics again. Like what some artists would do in the ’90s, where they would just etch something in the liner notes talking about how fucked up something is, talk about something that represents more of what reality is. I guess all this music, specifically for this record, is a metaphor for that, because of how chaotic it is.

I tried to make this whole record basically personification of a stream of consciousness of so many different feelings: existential chaos, thinking of this liminal space in this chaotic moment of time that we’re in. The chaos of using things like spirituality as a form of escapism. I’m trying to take it from a form of just pure, hedonistic escapism – which has been a cornerstone of dance music culture – to making it less about escapism and more about talking about what’s causing these sounds, like the thought processes or mental dualities. I want it to be more of something where people hear it, read about it, and think ‘actually yeah, I feel this way too’. I think that we should all stop following a formula and just kind of vomit your existential dread in your music.

Spirituality is a common theme but not necessarily tied to a specific faith – there’s track titles referencing heaven, Samsara, the River Styx from Greek mythology. How would you describe your personal experience with spirituality and how does it inform your music?

Like I was saying before, I grew up in a church and that was a really crazy, formative experience for me, because from a very young age I was indoctrinated by religious dogma and beliefs. I grew up being a Christian believer, like full on, until I was 15 or so, when I started to question things, probably because I started smoking weed and listening to music from bands that were making me question everything. I think that entire moment of reawakening – from realising I was being indoctrinated into something to self-liberation – wasn’t a liberation in the good sense necessarily, because it comes with lots of trauma. I wanted that to be reflected in this album.

My views on spirituality are evolving all the time. In general, I would say I’m pretty agnostic, I’m pretty atheist, but I do these days like to dabbe in a cheeky version of it, where it’s like I’ve gone so far with putting in energy into thinking that everything is bullshit that I’m sort of recontextualising that in a way where I’m not actually overthinking it, I’m using it to support or bolster my own presence and enjoyment in life. For example, I don’t believe in astrology at all, but now I’m sometimes like ‘yeah it’s because I’m a Leo!’. Taking a non-serious, cheeky approach to recontextualising spirituality can be really powerful. It can be a really nice thing for me to use these themes and talk about them in music, because I actually have lots of trauma from being in a church and dealing with the sphere that comes along with that, and the fear of thinking that I was gonna go to hell for the first quarter of my life. Recontextualising that to be something sonically healing, to take those titles and apply them to my music now, is a form of power that I feel, and hopefully transfers to other people. We can take those spiritual themes and recontextualise them in a way that works for us, and has nothing to do with pain, or fear, or trauma.

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Your label Shaytoon Records – that word is Farsi for ‘Little Devil’’, and was also the nane of your debut album. Why did you choose that word? Was it related to that control over spirituality?

That word in Farsi is more of a word that means you’re being mischeivous, it’s something your parents will say to you when you’re being bad, in like a funny way — “you’re being a little shaytoon! Get outta here!” you know? The reason I did that name for my Dark Entries album was because that was the starting point of the moment where I wanted to start baking my identity into my music, instead of following what the popular sound was. For me personally, taking that stance has been a non-linear road, in terms of: I feel like I would be further in the music game if I was just following what certain peers were doing with their concepts and sound. But it’s been more fulfilling for me to start including my Persian identity on my album, starting a label where I’m focused on Iranian and Middle Eastern artists. It’s not the easy route – it’s really hard, because people love to take these themes and just regurgitate some trope or tokenise it. That stuff happens all the time, and it messes up the whole thing, because the whole point is reclaiming identity. To show we’re also these people, we’re also you: we’re weirdos, freaks, club kids, who play crazy bangers and want to be booked at the crazy festivals. But it’s not that easy to do, because people still have a warped view of artists like us when we’re talking about our identities. We get pigeonholed still, really hard. So it wasn’t the easy, linear path, but it was more fulfilling and rewarding. Now I feel like I have a platform and a following and stuff, it’s been even more rewarding, because I feel like people are starting to vibe with the candidness of all the stuff.

It must be frustrating for your personal identity to come through in your artistry and then see yourself pigeonholed. People like to box off artists: ‘this is Latin music, this is Indian club edits, this is Iranian club music’. We’ve seen monolothic scenes constructed around artists just being themselves in a way that’s authentic to them personally.

Totally. And it’s really important to do that [be authentic] because, as I’ve have been doing this more self-professed identity stuff within the music, since I started the label, since I started doing these conceptual records, more and more people continually over the years come out of the woodwork and tell me how important it is to them. Everytime that happens, even though it’s not the greater dance music community as a whole, it makes it way more important for me. It makes me feel like I’m part of something that’s really important, and has a necessity to be grown right now. Talking about these concepts of spirituality, religion, culture, identity in the same context as music that makes sense in today’s world and that people actually like, I think it’s a really potent and important combination.

How would you personally describe the way your Iranian heritage informs the music you make?

It’s a delicate balance. It’s incredibly important to me, but it’s also an incredibly delicate thing because of the pigeonholing we were talking about. Since I started it, I’ve noticed that people love to just focus on that because it’s their little news, bitesize tidbit they can use for their headline. It tends to dilute the entire thing because it tends to get hijacked by questions like ‘what’s it like being an Iranian artist?’ and ‘what’s your trauma?’ People just scratch the surface with it instead of the whole concept of: this is where it’s coming from, but this is where I want it to go.

The Iranian heritage affects everything. The culture of upbringing and the collective trauma that we all have as artists — if you listen to Iranian music in general it’s always sad. There’s like no happy Iranian music. Even if it sounds happy the lyrics are talking about how their soul is being crushed. We’re withholding lots of generational and contemporary trauma, and all of us are split away from our families. I can never go there because of everything that’s going on, or it’s really risky for me to go there, so I can’t see my family. All these things affect and feed into my music. The main vehicle for a lot of my music-making is the balance between trauma, a lot of which comes from the collective pain of Iranians, and the healing process behind it.

Besides that, growing up Iranian was definitely a dancey lifestyle, you’re growing up in all of these gatherings that are constantly playing music, which I think definitely plays a part in why Iranians are really obsessed with music. They just didn’t get a chance to grow up like the rest of the world because of what happened in Iran, all getting restricted since the ’80s. It’s an entire collective group of people who are dying to release energy and creativity and express themselves in music, and have never gotten a chance to. I was lucky to grow up here [in the US], so that I could be influenced by stuff like the San Francisco rave scene. I learned so much, and they all can’t. I feel that from them and that affects the music I make. That’s why I started my label, and why when I first did the Dark Entries record I decided to go for that theme. It affects everything, but it’s not the main thing.