Flower Storm: Techno Rhythms with Samples from Iran
Making music on impulse can be a lot of fun, but it’s a very different practice from developing a focused project with aims, rules and limitations. Before they came together as Flower Storm, Kasra Vaseghi and Sepehr Alimagham had rarely applied their club music craft to a specific concept, and as artists from the Iranian diaspora in London and New York respectively, they established themselves as DJs and producers without explicitly folding their shared heritage into their music.
“There were some periods during my radio residency on NTS where I was dabbling with the history of Iranian music,” explains Kasra, “and I found some of it rhythmically really similar to techno, especially in traditional Iranian where it's just rhythms. I thought it was something that would resonate really well in the dance music world.”
The lockdown period provided the perfect opportunity to indulge this idea, and after they had connected online a chance festival cancellation gave Vaseghi and Alimagham a week together to map out the plan for a collaborative project which celebrated their roots while reflecting their diverse cultural outlook. Sampling presents all kinds of interesting dilemmas and debates, but Flower Storm was approached as a carefully considered process long before any music was made.
“One of the reasons I was so keen to work with Kasra is that he had all the ethos down to a T,” says Sepehr. “He had a document that outlined everything, like, ‘this is what the project is, this is what the song titles are going to be, we're only going to release on our label, we're not going to work with these kinds of people, we will work with these kinds of people.’”
Flower Storm have released two EPs to date — Yek and Do, which mean ‘one’ and ‘two’ in Farsi respectively. In their solo careers Vaseghi and Alimagham have mostly made house and techno to date, but this new project is not bound to any specific style. Instead, the focus is on sampling Iranian music and instrumentation and folding it into a dance music context. It’s not presented as an academic study of Iranian music for an Iranian audience — having grown up with equal cultural input from East and West, it’s an honest reflection of themselves for anyone to enjoy.
“We’ve had DJs like Donato Dozzy and Ben UFO playing our tracks,” says Vaseghi. “It’s crazy to make something so rooted in your heritage and for it to go somewhere so different, but it's so cool at the same time. We didn't want to make music to only be heard by Middle Eastern people. Sepehr's pretty much lived in the US all his life and I've lived in the UK for 14 years. Both of us have lived this mix of both.”
Stylistically, Flower Storm’s broad spectrum of tempos and rhythms from low tempo ‘chuggers’ to experimental drum & bass are bound together by the strength and purpose of their creative approach. Both namecheck Future Sound of London and Aphex Twin as fundamental inspirations — artists who operate based on ideas rather than genres. Cult British industrial group Coil is perhaps their greatest influence of all, to the point they adopted the approach of creating multiple versions of their tracks and even made ‘The first trial’ as a reimagined take on Coil’s ‘Further Back and Faster’.
The first step in realizing the vision for Flower Storm was to gather together source material. While Iran’s pre-1979 revolution pop and psychedelic scene was a good source of vocals, these more Western-influenced musical arrangements were less relevant to the project’s aims. It was the percussive complexity of traditional Iranian music played on instruments like the daf, tonbak and santoor that promised exciting results when combined with electronic music production. There is a rather limited pool of usable recordings of the sounds they were looking for, which provided its own inspiration in getting resourceful with what was available.
From the outset, both producers were determined to not simply take wholesale samples of musicians and drop them on top of beats, but to process and manipulate the samples to make the music their own. This allowed them to build up a personalized library before they started piecing tracks together. The sample pack that accompanies this article gives you access to some of the custom sounds they created while developing the sonic direction of the project.
“A lot of things I did were very simple,” says Vaseghi, describing how he approaches manipulating samples. “Sometimes I just take the sample, put it into Arrangement View, chop it up and move it around. If you have an eight-bar loop, you can do so many things with it. For example, I take an eight-bar loop of a daf, take some bits off, have one fourth that's running through reverb, then go back to dry, then have a little small section that has distortion, then one part reversed, almost like a manual way of doing stuttering.”
“In the sample pack, ‘Tonbak Madness’ is a really old recording I ran through the Culture Vulture distortion unit,” he adds. “On ‘Tonbak Vox’ the vocal was from a song I ran through a Euclidean sequencer, and then ran arpeggios on it. Sometimes I used lots of effects chains, sometimes not that much.”
Working with Iranian sound sources also presented challenges. Iranian traditional music in particular has a deep and complex history of scales and tuning systems which don’t always naturally align with Western approaches to music-making.
“It's really hard production-wise to produce with this kind of music,” Alimagham points out. “There’s something about the frequency ranges in Iranian music — it's big and boomy, and when you try to mix a lot of the sounds together they clash very easily, even with the nae which is a flute-like instrument. In order to put together something cohesive and easy on the ears, it takes a lot of care, which is a testament to the music in general. The source material is meant for high-intensity emotional states, so our goal is to get that same high emotional state and communicate it in our different world, with a contemporary sound.”
Alongside the tonal challenges, the intricate rhythms of the drums are also more challenging to align with a standard Western 4/4 meter. Not only distinctly different time signatures, but also the expressive fluctuations of a human drummer can make it hard to find parts which neatly loop. Instead, Alimagham found it more interesting to take an Iranian drum track, lay it over an electronic pulse and scroll through until something clicked.
“The drums are so freeform that when I'm sampling it, I don't even attempt to line up anything,” he explains. “Half the time when I’m producing, it sounds like a train wreck and then I just keep searching through the sample until suddenly, it’s like, ‘oh, there it is.’ Then I start working on the track.”
Regardless of the challenges the source material poses, the strength of the concept and the commitment to represent their heritage pushes Flower Storm forwards. Vaseghi explains how the track titles are drawn from Shahnameh, a 10th Century text otherwise known as The Persian Book Of Kings. The project’s artwork, designed by Vaesghi’s brother Morteza Vaseghi, depicts English text in a Farsi-inspired font. The name itself, Flower Storm, comes from a 1970s animation by Ali Akbar Sadeghi. Samples scattered throughout the tracks are easter eggs of Persian culture for the curious to discover, such as the sound of the master of ceremonies conducting a Pahlevani ritual — a combination of gymnastics and wrestling which dates back to ancient Persia.
Vaseghi and Alimagham aren’t blind to the sensitivity around sampling-centric music, particularly when the source material comes from non-Western culture. Even with their heritage, they feel the obligation to justify their approach and live up to the music they draw their inspiration from.
“I'm Iranian, so if somebody were to challenge us on whether we should be sampling from Persian culture, I'd be fine to defend myself,” says Sepehr. “I'm more terrified about doing it right, giving the music the good service it deserves.”
“There are people we are sampling who have literally spent their whole life learning a particular kind of percussion,” Vaseghi adds, “so you feel you have to live up to what they've done in terms of dedication.”
As they look to the future of the project, the duo’s own dedication is apparent. Beyond the more immediately accessible recorded music they’ve found so far, now their ideas for sound sources are widening to take in collaborations with live musicians and contacts with dusty boxes of tapes in Tehran alike. The boundaries of the project are sparking ideas which might not have come from idly jamming with no fixed agenda, in the same way their unique samples might inspire you to take your own music in unexpected directions.
Follow Flower Storm on Bandcamp
Text and Interview: Oli Warwick