Dariush Dolat-Shahi - Electronic Music, Tar and Sehtar (Dead-Cert)

Electronic Music, Tar And Sehtar by Dariush Dolat-Shahi has just been reissued on vinyl by Dead-Cert, yes, those trendy bastards. The sleeve's hand-assembled by children paid in old Finders Keepers t-shirts, vinyl remastered at a Berlin whorehouse by the cleaner, who used to work at the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk studio in Cologne, as a cleaner, but he picked up a few tips whilst sweeping up Herbert Eimert's chewed-up fingernails, apparently. So you know it's going to be quality. Only 50 copies pressed, so expect it to appear on eBay early next year for double the price, without being sold, because what really sells on eBay are spare nuts and bolts, make-up, handbags and prints of photos signed by Gary Barlow - I should know, I've reposted Killer Kazakhstan Cinematic Grooves (Finder Keepers 075) three times with no takers, only two watchers. Asking price was only £40...I'm not bitter, mind...

So who is Dariush Dolat-Shahi? No idea. This has been knocking around as a file for years, though, so avid followers of the more interesting music blogs will know it - those evil bastards...destroying the music industry by sharing out-of-print CDs and albums, and worse, records which poor eBayers used to be able to make a living from by feeding the needs of rare vinyl junkies - criminal. VJ's can get their fix now, thanks to Dead-Cert.

Honestly, when I was a teen I couldn't have dreamt that vinyl would be so expensive, but hey, if the cottagers, sorry, cottage industry can get by remastering old records, good luck to them. I had to make do with products of vast corporate crypto-fascist organisations like CBS spreading Herbie Hancock around the world. Even Punk labels, whose products were stuck together with snot and glue, didn't charge more than the majors. Still, they sold more than Dead-Cert, I suppose.

I like this album a lot. It's lean, electronically-speaking; an ethno-electro-acoustic fantasy created by an American-Iranian going back to his roots having nicked a load of kit from the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, plugged it into a generator in the desert and started jamming, if you can 'jam' with a Tar, which seems unlikely. Ancient to The Future (as dreamt of by studio boffin sound pioneers), it's trance-inducing, mesmeric, mind-altering, you might say, as we're swept from string-driven thing to the warble and woof of techno shadings pulsating, along with samples of birds and thunder storms. Quite magical, but not quite THE GREATEST ELECTRONIC RECORD EVER MADE that sellers would have us believe.