28th – 30th November, Betonhalle Silent Green
During three intense evenings, Tehran Contemporary Sounds presents a slate of 15 live/AV performances that fuse visual abstraction, sonic experimentation and embodied expression. From intimate gestures to expansive soundscapes, these works negotiate identity, memory, resistance—and the thresholds where image and sound merge.
Featured artists include 9T Antiope, Anousha Nazari & Antoine Morinière, Atena Eshtiaghi, Amir Torangan × Gaetha (and Decayed), Fløi Zāprūz, Gisou Golshani, Hjirok, Kimia Koochakzadeh, Navid Afghah, Quartet Diminished, Saba Alizadeh & FARZANE (World Premiere), Scream Manifesto, Sadaf H Nava, and the enigmatic The Sleep of Reason Creates Monsters (aka The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters).
Across the festival nights, each performance approaches the image-sound boundary differently—some weaving cinematic fragments, others sculpting audio-visual atmospheres through live processing, spatialization, and durational shifts.
Whether through quietly rendered motions or bold sonic gestures, the program invites the audience into moments of suspended attention—spaces where listening and seeing fold into each other.
Join us for three evenings of experimental, boundary-pushing work that brings new voices from the Iranian and diasporic artscape into proximity with audiences in Berlin.
Friday:
Anousha Nazari & Antoine Moriniere
Atena Eshtiaghi
Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi
Navid Afghah
The Sleep of Reason Creates Monsters
Saturday:
Gisou Golshani
FLØI ZĀPRŪZ (World Premiere)
Zakhme: Saba Alizadeh & Farzane (World Premiere)
Gaetha x Amir Torangan
9T Antiope & Amir B. Ash (Divine – World Premiere)
Sunday:
Aida Khorsandi
Sadaf H. Nava
Hjirok
Scream Manifesto
Quartet Diminished
Friday 28.11.2025
Anousha Nazari & Antoine Morinière
Baroque Labyrinth: When Handel Meets Maraghi
Iranian mezzo-soprano Anousha Nazari and French classical guitarist Antoine Morinière trace a delicate path through time — where Baroque masters like Handel, Purcell, Dowland, and Strozzi encounter the timeless melodies of 15th-century Persian composer Abd al-Qadir Maraghi.
In this intimate dialogue between voice and guitar, East and West intertwine. Each piece unveils a hidden symmetry — a shared sensibility that transcends centuries and geographies.
A sonic labyrinth of ornament and emotion, where Baroque restraint meets Persian ornamentation, and difference becomes resonance.
Atena Eshtiaghi
In her solo project, Atena Eshtiaghi weaves an intimate soundworld between the cello, the Persian gheychak, and contemporary electro-acoustic textures. Rooted in classical and Persian traditions, her compositions unfold as landscapes of memory and transformation — where resonance becomes storytelling, and every sound a trace of something remembered or reimagined.
By blending acoustic depth with electronic fluidity, Atena creates a dialogue between cultures, times, and inner worlds — an invitation to listen across borders, to feel sound as both remembrance and renewal.
Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi
Unheld I/II
An experimental audio-visual piece by Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi (sound) and Saghi Ehteshamzadeh (visuals), Unheld III traces tender moments of disassociation and dislocation in female bodies — gestures of quiet liberation from systems of control.
A requiem for displacement, the work lingers in fragments of home, where belonging is fragile and identity begins to unfold only at a distance.
The visuals, created by Ehteshamzadeh specifically for this iteration, reimagine the live imagery of Unheld II as layered digital memory — flickering between rupture and remembrance.
Koochakzadeh-Yazdi is an Iranian composer and performer whose practice bridges electronic, instrumental, and audiovisual composition, currently based in San Francisco.
Ehteshamzadeh, a queer interdisciplinary artist from Tehran based in Vancouver, works across video, new media, and performance, exploring displacement, disability, and feminist resistance through moving image and live visuals.
Navid Afghah
A master of Iranian classical and contemporary composition, Navid Afghah bridges centuries of sonic tradition with the pulse of modern experimentation. Born in Shiraz and trained at the Center for Preservation and Propagation of Iranian Music, Afghah’s work spans harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration, merging the rigor of classical craft with the fluidity of improvisation.
His performance at TCS 2025 offers a rare encounter with one of Iran’s most distinctive musical voices — a composer and multi-instrumentalist whose career connects Tehran to Tokyo, London to Berlin. Afghah’s sound world, refined through decades of collaboration with figures such as Hossein Alizadeh, Kayhan Kalhor, and Shahram Nazeri, evokes both the mathematical elegance and emotional intensity of Iranian music.
The Sleep of Reason Creates Monsters
Forged at London’s Café OTO, this explosive quartet — Mariam Rezaei, Mette Rasmussen, Gabriele Mitelli, and Lukas König — dismantles jazz, noise, hip-hop, techno and new music into a wild, ecstatic sonic storm.
A punk elegance of free improvisation. A brutal, unfiltered joy and a sonic maelstrom of four distinct voices forming one volatile organism.
Saturday 29.11.2025
Gisou Golshani
Duaye Khaar دعای خار by Gisou Golshani, a textural imagining of uncertain futures, frustrated species, and harsh landscapes. Inspired by Alhagi maurorum, a thorny desert shrub found on a road trip through northeastern Iran, Duaye Khaar (Prayer of the Thorn) channels climate grief through elemental relations — salt, water, wind.
London-based artist Gisou Golshani performs sonic rituals of belonging and transformation, weaving Iranian folk mythologies and grief practices into drone-heavy, voice-driven landscapes. Together with Kurdish artist Helin Karabil, whose live visuals blend ancestral memory and queer identity, they conjure a sensorial space where loss and resilience intertwine.
FLØI ZĀPRŪZ (World Premiere)
There was no plan.
Only some Romanian dust on a Swedish library floor and a power cable with longing in it. Out of nothing (or maybe a rendering error) came Fløi Zāprūz — slimy, mixed, overstimulated, wearing ballerina pumps in size ∞.
An audiovisual entity. A glitch-being.
A folk tale never translated, sung through AI vocal cords with half-functioning motherboards.
Produced in Unreal Engine by someone who forgot why they started, but couldn’t stop.
It’s for those who’ve been too much and too little at once.
For those who asked “Where are you from?” and were told “Don’t make so much noise.”
Fløi Zāprūz makes noise.
Witch soup with MIDI.
A memory rendered in polygons and uploaded for download.
Zakhmé: Saba Alizadeh & Farzané (World Premier)
A speculative ritual on Digital Alterity and Emergent Traditions.
Zakhmé brings together composer and kamancheh player Saba Alizadeh and artist-researcher Farzane Noori in a performative dialogue between human and machine — between embodied memory and algorithmic intuition.
Structured in three phases — Learning, Imitation, Improvisation — the work explores how AI can act not as an imitator, but as an other, an autonomous creative presence.
Drawing from non-Western theosophy, Zakhmé rethinks what tradition means in a time of computation, proposing a cosmotechnical exchange where digital and human intelligences co-exist, collide, and resonate.
Amir Torangan X Gaetha
A meeting point of noise, rhythm, and raw impulse. In Confrontation, Amir Torangan and Abtin Sadati (Gaetha) merge improvisation, live sound design, and real-time sampling into an ever-shifting electronic dialogue. Nothing is rehearsed, nothing repeats — analogue textures collide with digital mutations, unfolding in unpredictable waves of tension and release.
A performance where the act of confrontation itself becomes form: volatile, immersive, and alive.
9T Antiope & Amir B. Ash – DIVINE (World Premiere)
For the world premiere of their forthcoming album DIVINE, the experimental duo 9T Antiope join forces with visual artist Amir B. Ash to stage a hyper-sensory fiction of synthetic supremacy and engineered dependence.
Set in a post-human dystopia where survival depends on a biotechnological substance called Divine, the work unfolds as a ritual between ecstasy, governance, and decay — a hallucinatory performance where sound, light, and image merge into a single fever dream.
A sonic descent into the sacred and the synthetic.
To drink is to live — to refuse is to vanish.
Sunday 30.11.2025
Sadaf H Nava
Sadaf is a New York–based musician and visual artist whose practice spans experimental electronics, violin improvisation, painting, and film. Her work moves between chaos and clarity — layering sound, image, and performance into a fractured yet cinematic experience.
Through her visceral performances, Sadaf challenges the gaze, unravelling the boundaries between artist, muse, and myth. Her sonic world collides global archaeologies of sound with raw intuition, creating an aesthetic of dissonance, seduction, and rupture.
Having presented her work at MoMA PS1, Performa Festival, the 9th Berlin Biennale, and ICA VCU, Sadaf arrives at TCS 2025 with an audiovisual set that burns through genres and expectations — a history written in heat.
Hjirok
HJirok is a mythical figure — born from memory, exile, and the dream of return. Conceived by Kurdish-Iranian artist Hani Mojtahedy together with Andi Toma (Mouse on Mars), this performance merges Sufi drum rituals, field recordings, and electronic transformation into a hallucinatory journey through sound.
Between tradition and futurism, trance and transformation, HJirok becomes both ghost and guide — a voice of displaced heritage that reclaims rhythm, language, and collective memory.
Scream Manifesto
Scream Manifesto is a sonic statement in a time of revealing massive horrors of the annihilation of human and more-than-human lives, when grieving seems banal.
Hoda Siahtiri comes to voice through the fierce energy of feminine archetypes.
Together with Azertyklavierwerke, she holds space for remembrance, precedence, and transcendence — a ceremonial performance that weaves a sonic dialogue between performers, space, and audience.
Quartet Diminished
Founded by guitarist Ehsan Sadigh in 2013, Quartet Diminished brings together Soheil Peighambari (woodwinds), Mazyar Younesi (piano, vocals), and Rouzbeh Fadavi (drums) — four distinct voices spanning Tehran, Paris, and Montreal. Together, they construct a sonic landscape that slips between composition and improvisation, precision and chaos.
Their music fuses avant-prog, experimental jazz, and Iranian rhythmic architectures into something entirely their own — intricate yet explosive, cerebral yet deeply emotional. On stage, the quartet functions like a volatile organism, pushing form and freedom to their limits.