Experimental Electronic Sound as Playful Articulation of a Compromised Sociality in Iran

A number of experimental electronic music compositions and performances from Iran emerged on the social media and in a few galleries across the Irani-an capital in 2009. Against all odds, these practices started to gradually form a small ‘scene’ that finally became established in the matter of a few years—arguably around 2013. This scene has since been represented publicly and legally inside the country through events organised by individuals, artist col-lectives, galleries, and festivals. It is also well known within experimental electronic music circles beyond the national borders. In a politically-forced absence of many other art/music forms in the public domain in Iran, the emergence and burgeoning of such an ‘avant-garde’ scene is significant from various perspectives. By locating these practices within a web of social-political-economic-technological agencies, in this article, I will argue how the scene’s aesthetics, in the broadest sense of the term, can be understood as a locus for crystallisation of a concurrent resistance against and embodiment of an invasive, yet ambiguous, form of ethical-moral-legal control, which has emerged as a result of the establishment’s four decades-long isolationist per-formance in an increasingly globalised ‘world’.