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Iran's psychedelic "Golden Fingers"

Kourosh Yaghmaei

Kourosh Yaghmaei got a santur from his father at ten and an electric guitar at fifteen. By eighteen he had founded the instrumental rock band The Raptures and picked up the nickname "Golden Fingers." By the early 1970s he was one of the defining figures of pre-revolution Iranian pop, combining Persian classical melody with the fuzz and drive of the psychedelic rock he loved from abroad. After 1979 his music disappeared from Iranian radio and shops overnight. He was barred from performing, recording, or traveling and repeatedly summoned before revolutionary courts, but he stayed in Iran instead of bribing his way out or emigrating, and quietly taught guitar through years of restriction. Decades later the reissue label Now-Again tracked him down and released 2011's Back From the Brink, which introduced "the godfather of Iranian psychedelic rock" to listeners half a world away from his first audience.

Iran's biggest star, then silenced

Googoosh

Faegheh Atashin was performing in her acrobat father's stage act by the age of three and had made her film debut by seven. By her twenties, recording as Googoosh, she was the most recognizable pop star in Iran. She sang in seven languages and set fashion trends, and an entire country copied her haircut. The 1979 revolution ended all of it within months. Charged with "moral corruption," briefly detained and questioned at Evin Prison, and made to sign an agreement not to perform, she spent roughly the next two decades as a private citizen inside the country whose culture she had once defined, with her passport and home confiscated. She finally left Iran in 2000. Her first comeback concert, in Toronto before a crowd in the thousands, made it clear that an entire diaspora had kept listening the whole time. She gave her farewell concert, also in Toronto, in January 2025.

Tar strings, wired into a synthesizer

Dariush Dolat-Shahi

Dariush Dolat-Shahi is a different person from the famous Iranian pop singer who goes simply by Dariush. He is a classically trained composer who left Tehran for Amsterdam in 1970 to study under Ton de Leeuw, then spent most of the decade moving between electronic-music studios (Utrecht's Institute of Sonology, New York's Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center) before completing a doctorate there in 1981. What he brought to his own compositions was unusual even by experimental-music standards: traditional Persian tar and setar, played with real improvisatory technique, set against synthesizer tones and field recordings of birdsong, frogs, and thunderstorms. 1985's Electronic Music, Tar and Sehtar, released on the Smithsonian's Folkways label, is still his best-known document of that fusion, and it gives the oldest instrument in the room the same weight as the newest.

The Collection