How cohesive is the underground scene?
Let me tell you something from the Minister of Culture of the Islamic regime, who announced it in the Islamic parliament a few days ago; he said that “Iranian Music House” is the main source of creating crisis in the country.
It should be noted that he’s just talking about the activities of the “Iranian Music House” which is supporting the musicians who work only in the traditional/folk music and also Islamic pop music genre. So, they don’t know any other sort of music except their own Islamic authentication music.
The strict censorship and severe repression for underground metal music are unimaginable and out of this paper. The music which is under the discriminatory and humiliating laws of this tyrannical regime which they provide for musicians for accepting them are totally shameful and awful with Insulting to the human values and putting down the identity and dignity of a human and also as a musician; So that working metal music particularly for us is impossible because we have a direct problem with the head of this dictatorship barbaric regime and also in our music we strongly emphasize to principal and important topics on human rights, freedom, democracy, discriminatory laws against women and also political and social denunciations/problems so as we said; those topics have got the high priority in our music and lyrics which resulted in working our music to an impossible event in Islamic regime, so there is no room for our metal music which is also considered as a satanic music by the Islamic regime and we don’t have any possibilities of freedom to perform or even release and sell our albums. We don’t have the freedom of expression in our music, And even as we mentioned earlier because of the corruption in the economic system in this regime, all Iranian banks are excluded and disconnected from the World Banking system, and we as an Iranian nationality are not allowed to have any international credit cards or even to open a PayPal account just because of this regime made this situations for Iranians, and we are not able to legally place our music on international main music platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, so not only we cannot expose our music in Iran, but also we are not able to release and sell our music in the international music platforms due to the existence and corruption of the Islamic regime created for Iranians.
Now consider it alongside of having dreadful hardships, obstacles, strict censorship and massive repression that we’re facing for playing metal music particularly for us who are in a complete opposition and strongly opposed to this Islamic regime. So we as a metal musician in Iran are under a lot of daily fear of getting arrested and long-term imprisoned every day but the only reason we continue on this path is our endless passion for music and metal music.
On your YouTube channel, there are many videos of you playing short guitar and bass parts. And I think, it is a big challenge to perform progressive metal. Are you self-taught musicians or do you have musical education?
Amin: Yes, I am very interested in daily practice and I think that a musician needs to practice a lot to get the desired technique, you have to practice a lot to keep what you have achieved so that you can maintain the quality of your playing. The side of technical parts in progressive metal style is very important because we have many instrumental parts in many songs of this style in where only instrumentalists perform technical parts and exchange technical musical sentences without the presence of the singer. But I think the alluring of progressive metal style happens when technique and emotion are combined to create a beautiful piece of music, and also in this sort of music you have the license of doing them or whatever you want freely so the musician is able to introduce his/her own creativities and new ideas and approaches to progressive music’s canvas.
Amin: At the age of 17, I started learning electric guitar by myself, and after a short period of time I started practicing Troy Stetina’s instructional guitar books and then John Petrucci’s rock discipline which was a huge turning point for me, and then I went into Creative Guitar 1 and 2 instructional books by Guthrie Govan. So after spending a lot of time on those books and practicing his methods then I became interested in the style of Jazz/Fusion music and then I started to extend my knowledge by learning, playing and practicing: Chord Chemistry, Modern Chord Progression and Single Note Soloing by Ted Greene.
From the beginning of my interest in playing metal music which back to when I was at the age of 17 years old, I was very interested in listening to different musical styles, in addition; learning the guitar and strengthening my technique, listening to different sort of music was the one of the indispensable part of my musical journey and still it is.
Armin: I do practice every day for 6 hours in the morning and In my opinion, practice is the most pivotal and necessary aspects of a professional musician, so having an specific daily practice has always got the high priority for me in a way that me and my brother had promised to ourselves that we wouldn’t have done anything else until these 6 hours of practice finished, it’s exactly like bodybuilding that if you want to maintain muscles and the body shape you have gained, you should go to the gym almost every day for building, strengthening and boosting your muscles, so having consistency is the critical point. The same is true in practicing music, So I believe that in order to be successful, you need several very important factors: Having discipline, having consistency, being patience, putting a lot of time for it alongside of working on your mind and not being disappointed. I became interested in metal music at the age of 16 and then started learning the bass, afterwards by listening to some of my favorite bands like Metallica, Dream Theater, Rush, Yes, as well as musicians like Stanley Clerk, Victor Wooten. Marcus Miller and Jonas Heilberg, then I started practicing their instructional books to improve my technique and my own style on the bass and at the same time, I always covered the songs I had passion for from my favorite bands. Anyway, I remember very well that I listened to a lot of different music and different bass players and this was one of the important aspects of my daily life it was so of the essence for me in a way that I fell asleep on the bed at night by listening to music with headphones in my ears. Finally, in 2009, I had been accepted into music program at Selkirk College in Canada, but unfortunately, due to the difficult financial constrain and condition, I couldn’t have gone to Canada for studying there but this led me to redouble my efforts in music, and as we mentioned earlier, we currently have 4 music albums in total, 2 albums with 2 EP.
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| Amin Saffar |
What is your songwriting process?
Our composition is based on three ways: the first one is that, we improvise, work and think on an idea specifically and improve it to create a song we like and, the point is that we are very good at getting the ideas quickly in which way we want to go.
the second one is that, sometimes we come up with a cool chord progression, a melody line, a riff or whatever comes to our minds we immediately record them on our iPhones and then, on the day that we are about to write music, those musical ideas provide us a very good valuable source for writing. On the other hand, we both a have separate folder on our computer that are full of different ideas for composing so when we start the writing process, we’re able to find out if a particular idea has got the potential of being a good song and if it doesn’t happen then we will go for the next idea.
And in the third way, we both jam but this time with our father, we all three together, start playing and improvising until we come up with a good idea, and then when we automatically look at each, unintentionally we realized that we have reached a remarkable idea, and then we focus on that idea, we work on it, we grow it and develop it to become a complete song.
Let me point out that everyday our composing mode is on so a part of our mind and brain is always ready to receive and record ideas. Everything that happens around us can have the potential of being a good song, which can happen in some forms like, reading a book or a science article or seeing a lick on the Internet, watching a movie, or anything else which subconsciously affects us.
It is clear, you are a huge fan of Dream Theater. When did you hear their music for the first time? What fascinated you in their music?
We've known Dream Theater since we started learning electric guitar and bass and, we've been a big fan of them from that time. Images & Words was the first album we heard from them and we were enormously impressed by that album and then, we really soon relied that we have to get all their album and this band was the one that we had been always looking for to hear, so they have a huge impact on our musical journey and they are the biggest influence on us musically and healthy lifestyle.
What impressed us most about Dream Theater and attracted us to them is that we had never heard something like that before which was musically in a very beautiful way of combining techniques in the form of riffs and solos which filled with emotion. In our opinion, Dream Theater is a world of all different elements of music, such as dark, technical, fast, melodic, emotional and so many other aspects that grabbed our attention for Dream Theater. The power and the creativity of all the members are outstanding and marvelous musically, and it’s like being on a roller coaster that takes you to the different musical journeys with drawing a considerable and valuable experience of it for you. When we got to know with Dream Theater, we realized that we have a lot of common senses with Dream Theater in terms of both music and healthy lifestyle.
So, after saving all of our money and borrowing a huge part of it, we finally managed on going to another country to see them. We’d always had the dream of meeting our musical heroes and attending in their concert and seeing them closely, that was one of our the most important priorities in our life and musical journey so we were always looking for the right time and right moment to that do, and eventually, it happened twice in 2014 and 2017.
So, at the end, we managed to meet Dream Theater in Istanbul/Turkey, we went to their concerts which was a phenomenal experience of seeing and talking to them closely, and also, we had gained a lot of valuable experience of seeing our heroes for the first time on the stage with our own eyes.
But the wasn’t the end, in 2014, during the meet & greet with them, we presented a Persian poem book called “Divan Of Hafez” to them which is in Iran’s culture and also literature culture immensely valuable and eminently respectable. Hafez is one of the big names and heavyweight poets in the history of Persian’ literature culture who lived in 13 century; so we thought to ourselves that this book could be a very unique gift from us and on the behalf of all Iranian people to Dream Theater as an American legendary band. So that, the interesting part is that, some months later, during a chat we had with Jordan Rudess the keyboardist of the Dream Theater he told us that this book was the best gift they had received in 2014 Images & Words and beyond tour.
But on the other side of the coin let me underline something that, we will never forget our rights which has been taken from us as a human rights by this Islamic dictatorship regime since they established themselves as a government in Iran from 42 years ago, they prohibited all the Rock/Metal foreign bands to come to Iran for doing concert and as long as this Islamic regime dominates its sinister existence over Iran this situation will be continued and things get even much more worsen. But we were so lucky that they came closely to Iran therefore we managed to meet them in Istanbul/Turkey.
I don't know if you have every day jobs, but how do you spend your days in general and how much time do you practice a week?
Yes, Music is our fulltime profession. We spend all of our time on music such as writing songs, recording, practicing and listening to new music, as well as teaching guitar online and mixing/mastering music for the clients and writing lyrics. Of course, we care about our health and also having a healthy nutrition and exercising for 1 to 2 hours during the day because we believe that a healthy body and healthy mind are the an important aspects of a successful musician with having a healthy, calm mind/spirit a musician would be able to write better, play better, think better as a result we never forget about doing sports and healthy activities during the day, also we put aside sometimes for meditating. not to mention that; we have lots of very good music for mediating. We would like to point out that we love animals and whenever we have spare time we go to Qeytariyeh Park in Tehran and feed the cats of the park, this makes us so lively, a very splendid feeling of being helpful as much as we can. We also love reading books and watching movies, and we always allocate a particular time during the week for reading books and watching movies and the last book we both read and love it so much is: “Writing Down The Bones” by Natalie Goldberg, and also one of our favorite movies is Interstellar. We are interested in taking photos in our free times and sometimes we play video games. We love cooking and grilling but we did everything together, and this is one of our favorite things to do during the week.
We both strongly believe in having a discipline to practice music consistently, we always do the practice and set aside a particular time for it 6 hours a day and we think that it is a necessary and important part of a professional musician’s life and this has become a daily aspect of our life like eating breakfast. One thing which is very important to us is that to have consistency in practice, since having consistency in the long term, makes the musician feel much more confidence about herself/himself while progressing on the road. So we’d like to mention that “you will start to lose if you don't use it”.
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| Armin Saffar |
Was there any precedent for thinking of giving up playing this „satanic” music?
From the very beginning as we were born, we have been in a house full of instruments and we were surrounded by the musicians, all the time we met different kind of musicians so our life has been full of music from all sort of it since we were kid.
From the very beginning we’ve always spent our time for music and on our musical instrument more than anything else in our life so, music has become a vital part of our being and existence. Ever since we knew ourselves as a person, we have never ever thought of such a thing, never.
From the moment we chose and started learning metal music at the age of 16 and 17 years old, we have faced with growing and a lot of different pressures, including repression, censorship, threat and attack from the Islamic regime in our musical journey and life. But music is our continued existence, identity and dignity, soul, mind, heart, it’s our life, it’s our love. But we must still pay attention to the fact that freedom, safety, and peacefulness are the most important factors for an artist, and an artist must create his own artwork in a peaceful, safe situation, away from any fear of getting arrested, threatened and anxiety. And this is an undeniable right of a human beings and human rights.
Finally, we should emphasize and highlight that we continue to play our instrument and metal music as long as our body’ muscles help us.
What gives you the motivation to play metal music even though it is very risky in Iran?
In the first place, music is something we have a great passion for, and in the second place, we love composing and creating music, because it makes us feel so accomplished and for us it’s really important to do something that we love and do it every day. We believe it’s the best feeling which we can have in our life because it makes our souls and minds blissfully happy.
On the one hand, we are confronting with a dictatorship regime and the capability of this style of music provide us a very good space to express ourselves to protest against tyranny and oppression so that with our music we are able to tell our own words although, we are severely repressed, censored and threatened by the Islamic regime. On the other hand; a real artist does not accept silence, repression, censorship and threat.
We never under any circumstances cannot see ourselves from being inconsiderate, irresponsible to what’s happening around us and not paying attention to the oppression and injustice and the discriminatory and Humiliating Islamic laws. we cannot be negligent It’s our main philosophy as a musician not to be silence.
Silence has no place in our music, lyrics and in our mind at all.
Artist should be the vivid voice of their society.
Thank you for your time!
The band noted:
Finally, we should mention something that: While we were writing this interview for Metal Prison, the Tehran’s power outages were turned off by the Islamic dictatorship regime many times in order to mining bitcoins and they made Tehran went dark just because of their massive corruption they have.
Therefore; It made us extremely annoyed during writing this interview for Metal Prison which caused losing our texts many times and set us back from sending it to them.
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