Maryam Rahmani & David Esser: Santur & Kamancheh for Electronics

On Santur & Kamancheh for Electronics, Maryam Rahmani and David Esser avoid the familiar framing of traditional instruments meeting electronic music. The album does not present the santur and kamancheh as fixed historical objects in need of modern transformation. Instead, electronics become a way of hearing their physical behavior more closely.

From opening track “Glass Tower,” contact microphones, geophones, and live processing expose vibrations that usually stay buried: sympathetic strings, wooden resonance, small mechanical sounds. Esser’s electronics sometimes retreat nearly entirely, extending natural resonance until the boundary between acoustic and processed sound is hard to locate. This approach sets the album’s logic.

Across pieces such as “Noah’s Sea Cave,” “Copper Playground,” “Dämmerung,” “Fields of Grain,” and “Bazar of Fireflies,” Rahmani’s voice and instrumental gestures sit inside shifting electronic textures. Field recordings from a children’s playground, for instance, become part of the kamancheh’s sustained quality rather than background detail. The record keeps Persian modal language present without turning it into cultural