After leaving Iran with his family at the age of 6, Emad Dabiri (Sarin) lived in Toronto before moving to Berlin in 2014. Though Toronto provided Dabiri with the foundation to pursue his music, he knew he had to move overseas to explore his art further. “The depth of the underground electronic scene [in Berlin] is vast,” says Dabiri. “There’s also a good sense of community and support among the artists and musicians here.” The current sounds coming out of Berlin, combined with Dabiri’s fixation on battle and warfare, influenced the menacing tone of Current Conflict.

Another factor was a piece of advice that Dabiri received from artist Jubal Brown, who he met in Toronto. Brown told him that his goal, when it came to his audience, should be to “penetrate their skulls.” Dabiri achieves this by focusing on the structural skeleton of a track. His minimalist approach to production creates space in the music and between the beats—an element that makes his songs appealing to techno DJs. (“The simplistic side stems from a lack of actual musical knowledge,” says Dabiri.)

Dabiri’s background is in “visual music”—an audio and video technique that is built from the repetition of video samples—and he still retains the precise and obsessive mentality of a video editor. “A lot of tedious editing goes into the sampling of obscure movies and news clips that become the vocal element in place of lyrics or my own vocals,” he says. “I spend a lot of time tweaking every other sound to get it just right. With drum samples, and basically any sound I use, I try to manipulate them to get them a bit darker and weirder than what they were originally.” (Bandcamp)