Rouzbeh Esfandarmaz is a musician, composer, and producer from Tehran, based in The Hague. His work is driven by a single obsession: Iran's musical interior. Not as a curiosity to be presented to outside ears, but as a living, unfinished world worth spending a lifetime inside.
Iran has, in his words, thousands of years of history, dozens of distinct languages and dialects, peoples as varied as Kurds, Baloch, Azeris, and Arabs, climates that can shift from alpine snow to desert within the span of a single day's drive, a musical tradition that reflects all of it, raw and unmediated, passed down through generations without being flattened into easy to consume products of our modern era. This is what draws him: music that hasn't been pasteurized.
That word matters to him. Much of what gets labeled "world music" or "fusion" is, in his view, a mistranslation. Iranian scales approximated into Western equivalents, microtonal nuances smoothed away for unfamiliar audiences e.g. the Isfahan dastgah is not minor. It is close, but the distance between the two is precisely where the music lives. Rouzbeh refuses to close that gap.
What electronic music offered him was not a modern container for ancient content, but something structurally related to it. His research kept returning to the same discovery:
The trance state that Iran's regional ritual music seeks, through drumming, chanting, and repetition, are the same collective states that electronic dance music reaches for. The Zār ceremony of the Persian Gulf coast and the dancefloor are not as far apart as they appear. Both are trying to get somewhere together. His Master's thesis at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague - Metamorphosing Iranian Folk: Integrating Iranian Folk Music into Electronic Dance Music - formalised this research, and it has shaped everything he has made since.
He began his training at the Art University of Tehran, where his Bachelor's dissertation analysed Alban Berg's clarinet works, an early sign of his dual grounding in both Western classical music and Iranian tradition. As a young musician he performed with the Iranian Orchestra for New Music and the National Youth Orchestra, and many more. In 2010 he co-founded Pallett, one of Iran's most influential alternative bands, producing three albums - Mr. Violet, Tehran Smile!, and Endless Ending - and touring 25 cities in the US, 16 in Europe, and performing across Brazil, Iran, and the UK. Endless Ending won best Experimental or Fusion album of the year from Musicema in 2017. He left the band in 2018 to pursue his Master's and his solo work in the Netherlands.
In 2020 he launched Esfand, an electronic project built directly from his research into Iranian ritual and regional music - Zār ceremonies, Bakhtiari melodies, Qashqai nomadic music, Kurdish traditions, and etc. The project released its debut EP Hélé, followed by the LP Piltan with 30M Records in Hamburg in 2024. Esfand has performed at festivals across Germany, France. Alongside his own projects, Rouzbeh has composed and produced music for film, theatre, and multimedia — including a Pulitzer Center-sponsored multimedia project, a VR experience for Tehran Platform, and works nominated for best score at Short Encounters IFF. He has received grants from the Gemeente Den Haag and the Goethe Institut for his research into Iranian folk and electronic music.
Living in the Netherlands, far from the country his music comes from, hasn't weakened the connection, it has intensified it. Distance, he says, makes you want to wear your culture like a protective cloth, something that keeps the soul intact among all the unfamiliar things pressing in from outside. That instinct is what Rouzbeh is, at its core: not nostalgia, not documentation, but a way of staying whole.