Throughout Los Angeles, Zachary Asdourian hunted for the music of an Iran that would have been.
The co-founder of the L.A. report label Discotchari scoured for dust-caked Persian pop information at Jordan Market in Woodland Hills; scanned the fliers for exhibits at Cabaret Tehran in Encino, and combed retailers in Glendale in search of Farsi-language tapes lower in L.A. studios within the ‘70s and ‘80s.
Most of the songs he and his label partner, Anaïs Gyulbudaghyan, sought were long-forgotten dance tracks, culturally-specific twists to the era’s disco increase. They’re poignant reminders of a time in L.A.’s Westwood “Tehrangeles” neighborhood when, within the years simply after the 1979 Iranian revolution, immigrants right here made music whereas their homeland roiled with ascendant theocracy.
Discotchari’s new crate-digger compilation “Tehrangles Vice” collects a few of the better of them. Its 12 tracks had been made in L.A. and circulated throughout the Iranian diaspora, then smuggled again into Iran on dubbed tapes and satellite tv for pc broadcasts. They’re largely misplaced to time right here, however fondly recalled there as bombastic dispatches from a cosmopolitan but heartbroken immigrant neighborhood in L.A.
The music has classes for artists watching the revanchist conservatism creeping over america in the present day.
“These songs were supposed to represent the next step in Iranian music,” Asdourian stated. “These artists had been geniuses at shaking up what was taking place within the ‘80s and ‘90s to produce an Iranian version of it. This music was meant to be heard at a party while dancing and drinking in Tehrangeles, but it also provided solace during the Islamic revolution, the Iraq war and the Iran-Contra affair. For citizens of Iran, this was giving hope as bombs were literally falling.”
The music scene this compilation documents came after a period of more stable relationships between the U.S. and Iran. Thousands of Iranian students immigrated to L.A. in the ‘60s and ‘70s and stayed, some opening restaurants and nightclubs in Westwood, Glendale and the San Fernando Valley where they could hear Iranian music.
“A lot of these clubs in L.A. pre-dated the revolution. Artists like Googoosh were already coming in from Iran to perform. Many musicians who were in U.S. when the revolution happened thought they were having a little sojourn and intended to go back someday,” said Farzaneh Hemmasi, a professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto who wrote the book “Tehrangeles Dreaming: Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California’s Iranian Pop Music” and contributed the liner notes for “Tehrangeles Vice.”
An insert from a cassette tape that Farokh “Elton” Ahi beforehand labored on.
(Emil Ravelo / For The Occasions)
“But after the 1979 revolution, musicians in Los Angeles were told by family in Iran not to go back, that they were rounding up artists, that people associated with westernization and immorality will be targeted,” Hemmasi stated. “So they stayed and worked.”
Certainly one of them was Farokh “Elton” Ahi, who got here to L.A. at 17 to check structure at USC, however left that profession to supply for Casablanca Information, the premier disco label of the period. He DJ’ed at Studio 54 in NYC and elite nightclubs in L.A., and produced for the likes of Donna Summer time and Elton John at his Hollywood studio, Rusk (Ahi received his nickname from an interviewer who known as him “Elton Joon,” a Farsi-language time period of endearment).
Even within the decadent disco period, he felt an obligation to champion Iranian music in L.A.
“We wanted kids to enjoy the link between our culture and western culture,” Ahi stated. “But we were also trying to bring what was happening in Iran to people’s attention with our music, which was one reason I could never go back there. Kids who had come from Iran loved Prince and Michael Jackson and were becoming super American, so we had to do something to keep them engaged in our music as well.”
Through the 1979 hostage disaster, Anglo nightclubs and radio in L.A. weren’t eager on Persian pop music, to say the least. Ahi led a double life as an Americanized disco producer, whereas additionally writing for his immigrant neighborhood.
“Those days, because of the hostage crisis, it wasn’t fun and games having Iranian music in the club. People were against Iranians and it wasn’t a happy time,” Ahi stated. “But we were making quality music with limited resources. There were not many musicians here who could play Iranian instruments, so I had to learn a bunch of them. I felt a duty to keep our music alive.”
Two ‘80s-era tracks he produced, Susan Roshan’s “Nazanin” and Leila Forouhar’s “Hamsafar,” seem on “Tehrangeles Vice,” which brims with the only-in-L.A. cultural collusion of mournful Persian melodies and lyrics about exile, paired with new wave grit and ‘80s synth-disco pulses. Aldoush’s “Vay Az in Del” has sample-blasted horns proper out of the ‘80s TV show that gives the compilation its name. There’s even a powerful Latin percussive factor on tracks like Shahram Shabpareh and Shohreh Solati’s “Ghesmat,” which confirmed how Iranian artists dipped into the worldwide crossroads of Los Angeles.
Even when this music didn’t make an impression on the charts right here, it discovered its method again to post-revolution Iran clandestinely, on tapes and music video satellite tv for pc broadcasts. Membership-friendly pop music made in L.A. took on new efficiency overseas.
“The official culture in Iran in the ‘80s was very sorrowful because of the war, and Shiite Islam was very oriented towards mourning. Ramadan was a sad time with no music,” Hemmasi stated. “But in L.A., you’ve got Iranians dancing and singing, which was not happening within the country where people needed to sing and dance even more. This music had a contraband quality that was underground in Iran itself.”
Prime to backside, Farokh “Elton” Ahi with report label Discotchari founders Zachary Asdourian and Anais Gyulbudaghyan in Los Angeles.
(Emil Ravelo / For The Occasions)
As up to date Angelenos rallying for this period of Iranian music, Asdourian and Gyulbudaghyan of Discotchari will cease at nothing to ship murkily-sourced tapes from Iran, western Asia and the Caucasus for his or her label. “In January, we went to Armenia and met a guy who knew a guy at a restaurant in Yerevan who had someone drive tapes in from Tabriz in Iran,” Asdourian stated. “They sent us GPS coordinates to pick them up, and we ended up in this abandoned former Soviet manufacturing district getting chased by a guard dog. But he had 30 cassettes, all still sealed in their boxes.”
But a few of the acts on “Tehrangeles Vice” are nonetheless energetic, residing and dealing in California. After a protracted hiatus, Roshan just lately launched new music impressed by Iran’s Lady, Life, Freedom Motion, and Ahi is a sound engineer and mixer for movie (he labored on “Last of the Mohicans,” which received an Oscar for sound mixing). He just lately contributed to a remix of Ed Sheeran’s “Azizam,” which sprinkles Farsi phrasing into upbeat pop and have become a worldwide hit. “Ed reached out and asked me to write some melodies that matched Googoosh’s singing to make it more international, we put our minds together and I’m so proud of it,” Ahi stated.
As america now reckons with its personal highly effective right-wing spiritual motion in authorities, one desirous to clamp down on cultural dissent, “Tehrangeles Vice” has classes for musicians within the wake of a backlash. The compilation is each a selected doc of a proud music tradition clamping down at house and flowering overseas. Nevertheless it’s additionally a reminder that, whether or not made in exile or performed beneath assault, artwork is a effectively of chance for imagining one other life.
“Even if the geographical location isn’t same, for Iranians, L.A. represents this exiled piece of history, an Iran that could have been,” Hemmasi stated. “It’s a message in a bottle from another time.”
