Engrossing debut album from Iranian sound artist, Pouya Ehsaei, sublimating samples of traditional Iranian music to “reveal the rage hidden beneath its melancholia.” There was produced in 2010, using fractured and brutally processed instrumentation indigenous to Iran to isolate a palpable feeling of tension articulated with a timbre unique to the artist’s background. In the course of its six pieces we perceive a stark and grinding sadness from his aerated arrangements, gleaning elusive emotions from a rich, whisked swirl of glistening tones that remain dangerously high in the mix, sustaining and imparting a perpetually heightened state of sensitivity that either makes each ornate shimmer and glisten cut like a piano string garotte, or accentuates the feeling of frustrated detachment and confusion in the two pieces employing Ahmad Shamliu’s indecipherable reading of poems written whilst in prison in 1954. As listeners, we’ve long been drawn to the deep melancholy of recordings created or informed by this region, from Muslimgauze to Honest Jon’s archival collections, thru to recordings by Dariush Dolat-Shahi or Touch’s Sohrab. Understandably, we’d file There in that precious pile.