1979’s Iranian Revolution saw millions of citizens fleeing the country in its aftermath. Amid this Iranian diaspora, many of these people emigrated to Los Angeles, with some of them being the same people who had contributed to pre-revolution Iran’s golden age of entertainment.
Now, a new compilation is putting a spotlight on the musical contributions of the artists and creators who formed this “Tehrangeles” scene. Out today on Discotchari, Tehrangeles Vice: Iranian Diaspora Pop 1983-1993 is a 12-track compilation released exclusively on vinyl. The project gathers music made between 1983 and 1993, with its name being a portmanteau of “Tehran” and “Los Angeles” and “Vice” nodding to the influence that television classic Miami Vice had on the compilation.
In a statement, the project’s creators say the compilation name “underscores the illicit nature and daring circumstances from which Tehrangeles pop music was born and compares its legacy within Persian media to one of the most significant crime–drama TV shows of all time. In the same manner that Miami Vice and its aesthetics had a dynamic impact on sonic, visual and cultural trends in the United States and around the world, Tehrangeles media was a shock to the systems of Islamic Republic ideology and Iranian expatriate communities.”
Available now here and on Bandcamp, the compilation features 12 remastered tracks, lyrics and translations to all featured songs, images of each song’s original cassette cover, a 20-plus page album note booklet by associate professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto Dr. Farzaneh Hemmasi and more.
“We discovered this music a little more than a year after we moved into the North Glendale neighborhood known as the “Persian-Armenian” area,” the project’s co-creator Zachary Asdourian tells Billboard of the compilation’s origins. “Less than a block away from our building is a very unassuming store called Pacific Video that we would always walk by but never check out because of its name and the fact that it was closed most of the times we saw it.
“One day,” Asdourian continues, “we noticed photos of Viguen, Martik, Googoosh and other famous pre-revolution singers posted in the window, so we finally decided to peak through and were met with shelves upon shelves of CDs containing Armenian, Persian, and other Middle Eastern / global music released throughout the 1990s and 2000s.”
Inside the store, they discovered “shelves full of old Persian movies and TV shows, produced in Iran as well as Los Angeles, cassette tapes, vintage equipment, and other retro media that altogether gave the feeling of stepping back in time. One of the first things that caught our eye in the store was a CD copy of Fataneh’s ‘Gol Va Atash’ album; after buying that CD and listening to the breakbeat drum machines with sparkling synthesizers on the track ‘Mola Mamad Jan; for the first time, we had a gut feeling that there was a lot more to discover.
After months of digging and learning more about the artists, labels, and producers behind the music through the internet, the artistic direction for Tehrangeles Vice became very clear and we had hundreds of tracks compiled from tens of thousands released over the course of 20 years…The musical depth of this scene sometimes feels unfathomable.”
Tehrangeles Vice: Iranian Diaspora Pop 1983-1993
Courtesy of Discotchari
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.billboard.com ’
