Sote - Ministry of Tall Tales (2024)

For our first release of 2024, we are excited and honored to welcome Sote to the SVBKVLT family with ‘Ministry of Tall Tales’

Ata Ebtekar, better known as Sote, is an electronic music composer and sound artist based in Tehran, Iran. His wide-ranging love of rich sounds and textures is embodied in diverse paths such as hardcore club sounds, collaborations that straddle (traditional) acoustic and electronic instrumentation, and solo experimental electronics – making Ebtekar equally at home in concert halls, galleries, or clubs. Over the last three decades, he has released on labels such as Warp, Sub Rosa, Morphine, Diagonal, and Opal Tapes.

‘Ministry of Tall Tales’ is an electronic music composition that reflects on hyperbolic orchestrations of political and social current affairs.

In this work, notions such as misinformation/disinformation, biased mental states, bigotry, dogma and ultimately corruption are brainchild of the composer in order to achieve a sonic spirit in abstract form.

Ludicrous and distorted human behaviors are told by magnifying musical intervals and entering the spaces in-between, and simultaneously dramatizing subtle microtonal motifs, ultra-fine polyrhythmic, polymetric and polytempic pitched patterns assemble the skeleton of an engine symbolizing various systems.

The configuration and framework of this mechanism represents both harmonious and non-harmonious aspects in society. Rearranging and coloring components of tradition, neglecting moral codes, and separating ingredients of rituals to showcase humankind’s failures and accomplishments.

The composer has been experiencing an immense amount of frustration, anger, confusion, helplessness and fear because of what has been happening in his surroundings and the sociopolitical system. Consequently, the music is contemplations on corruption, oppression and murder.

“Ministry Of Tall Tales” is an all-synthesis based work, dark and melodic with a noise aesthetic.