Rojin Sharafi
Rojin Sharafi (* Teheran, Iran) is a Vienna basted composer, sound artist and sound engineer. At the age of 17 she moved from Teheran to Vienna to study composition. Described as “raw and refined, rough and dreamy”, her music explores acoustic, electro-acoustic and electronic approaches.
Influences from folk, ambient, noise, metal and contemporary music are evident in her transdisciplinary practice, as are references to literature, performance and video art. Sharafi uses various drum machines, analogue and self-programmed instruments, which she developed together with a university lecturer, to create her very own textures.
By improvising with both analogue and digital setups, she has expanded her formal languages, paying particular attention to different temporal qualities, timbres and methods of composing and decomposing dramatic moments such as tension and surprise.
On the occasion of her second album ‘Zangaar’ in 2020, which is based on her own poems, she mentions the importance of improvisation in her work: “Improvisation has a lot to do with allowing chance and decision-making in that very moment. I often improvise with different instruments or electronic devices. (…) I want to perceive the coincidences that happen as an aesthetic of improvisation, and not as something wrong that you want to actively prevent.”
Her debut album ‘Urns Waiting To Be Fed’ was released in 2019, and The Quietus praised it as “the truly unexpected”, calling it “one of the most ecstatic and wild hours of music”. She released both albums on Zabte Sote, a label for experimental music by artists from Iran.
She has collaborated with the Why Not? Collective, the Decoder Ensemble, the Schallfeld Ensemble, the Black Page Orchestra, the Ensemble Phoenix Basel and the Ensemble United Berlin. Sharafi also regularly collaborates with film and dance productions, including the Arte Creative and the Tanzquartier Wien.
She has performed at international festivals such as SET x CTM 2018 (Tehran), Unsafe+Sounds 2018 (Vienna), Hyperreality 2019 (Vienna), Wiener Festwochen 2020 (Vienna), Musikprotokoll 2020 (Graz), No Bounds (Sheffield), Skanumezs (Riga), Schiev (Brussels), Intonal (Malmö). In 2020, she was supported by Shape, a digital platform for innovative art.
She was also awarded the Austrian Composer Prize at the Wien Modern Festival in Vienna in 2018.
Rojin Sharafi:
“To be difficult to categorise is interesting to me. This started subconsciously but has become quite obvious to me by now. The boundary between aggression, tension and energy is quite fragile. I like to move along those boundaries. My music is very impulsive and restless. There is a lot going on and that leads to a certain artificial restlessness. The events and figures are sometimes extreme in their frequencies, rhythms and other characteristics.”
