Tegh

Tegh, the solo ambient music project of Iranian composer Shahin Entezami, was originally part of the duo Artirial with Kamyar Tavakoli. Their mini-album Artirial (2013) is devoted to a kind of minimal techno that is warm, delicate, sophisticated, both ambient and glitchy. The eight-minute Imagination, a highly creative piece, feels like a recording of quantum vacuum. Failed weds more lively beats with enchanted guitar tones. Depth blends jangling guitar, droning synth and wacky drum-machine.

Tegh's first solo album Night Scenes (Inner Ocean, 2014) harks back to electronic ambient music of the 1980s. They Were From Somewhere Cold is a stately version of Robert Rich's thick and dynamic cosmic music. The slow-motion oceanic tide of Conn segues into the pastoral trance of Autumn. Birds Are Singing On A Tree Without Leaves is an ethereal wind of refracted melodies.

The mini-album Through The Winter Woods - Hibernate Recordings (2015), a collaboration with Kamyar Tavakoli, contains three compositions of more dramatic electronic soundscaping, notably the lugubrious exploding nebula of Hollow and the tense, cinematic Disappeard Stratum.

Downfall (Midira, 2017) is a symphony of droning electronics in five movements, from the abrasive missiles of Downfall I (8:08) and the electrocuted church organs of Downfall II (5:31) to the slow dissonant crescendo of Downfall III (11:00) and the massive overtones of Downfall IV (11:12), ending with the funereal Downfall V (7:40). Despite the bombast, the music is rather simplistic and uneventful.

Unusual Path (2019) contains the 19-minute droning nightmare Unusual Path, which sounds like an extension or revision of Downfall, and two remixes of it by Siavash Amini (Iran) and Zenjungle (Greece)

The cassette Emergent Errors (Opal Tapes, 2020) returned to his original abstract soundscaping but with an almost punk-ish passion for ferocious atmospheres, resulting in dark and cryptic compositions. Heat is a sound collage of glitchy ambience, magniloquent drones and plaintive violin. Melted Organs Remained Skins indulges in industrial noise (quasi-metal distortion, pulsing machinery) and ends with organ drones. Smelled Like Rotting Flesh could be the soundtrack for a sci-fi movie about alien civilizations. Now She's Alive But She Was Dead At The Time opens with equally extraterrestrial noises but ends with what sounds like the sample of a classical violin sonata. The cassette's title hints at these as "errors", self-organizing errors, as if they spontaneously emerged from attempts to write soothing ambient music.

Ima (Injazero, 2022) contains collaborations with violinist Adel Poursamadi. The violin is given the same cacophonous treatment experimented on Emergent Errors, resulting in the violent electrical shocks that end Bad`a (10:40), the eruption of drones in the middle of Regh`e (7:34), and grating and desperate dissonance of Gaman (8:38).