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You can't go far on the tangled motorways of Tehran without getting stuck in traffic. It was late July and I was weary from another day of suffocating, 40-degree heat, but as we entered another gridlock, Ata Ebtekar was in a characteristically good mood. A car with two young men pulled up beside us, blasting out Persian hip-hop. Ebtekar turned to look at them, and couldn't resist analysing the acoustics of their vehicle which was rattling ominously. "That's an extremely sustained bass sound," he chuckled. The traffic lights changed and we left them behind, sailing towards a horizon of mountains and construction sites, the sunset turning the blue sky gold.

Ebtekar is one of Iran's most accomplished electronic musicians, and he had something to show me. As night fell we arrived at Azadi Square, the biggest in the capital, where a five-lane roundabout encloses the iconic Azadi Tower. A dramatic arch of blue-veined white marble, both modern and rooted in ancient Islamic design, it looks as if the stone has been swept into a graceful peak by a giant hand. Ebtekar calls the tower "a masterpiece." It's hard to see it and remain unmoved.

Azadi means "freedom" in Farsi. The tower was built under the last Shah in 1971 to celebrate 2,500 years of the Persian empire, and has been the backdrop to much of the country's recent history. It was a gathering place for protestors in the 1979 Islamic Revolution and again during the Green Movement of 2009, when hundreds of thousands gathered to protest the contentious reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The tower wears this history lightly. All was peaceful as Ebtekar and I arrived, with fountains leaping and young people snapping selfies. A crowd was gathering to see an audiovisual display by a French artist, which would be projected onto the monument. We sat on stone benches that still radiated heat from the day's sun, and were joined by some of Ebtekar's musician friends. After lengthy introductions in Farsi by the mayor of Tehran, a woman gave a condensed English translation: "We are very excited to introduce this video-mapping performance, a technology which is very new, even in Europe."

After the Iranian and French national anthems, the show began. It was enormously underwhelming. The music was thin and formless. Ebtekar described it as "fifth-rate musique concrète." The visuals reminded me of the Windows 98 screensavers that hypnotised me as a child. There were numerous technical problems. When the performance was over, nobody clapped. They just left.

Ebtekar was pissed. "You have this amazing structure and you're not going to take it to the next level?" he said. "It makes me really angry that the government should spend money on something like this and when Iranians ask for funding we have to go searching at the Goethe Institut. Why not support artists in your own country?"

Even without government funding, a week later Ebtekar, along with a group of like-minded friends, would stage the fourth edition of SET festival, an audiovisual event far more ambitious and successful. They would play dance music in a place where dancing is forbidden. They would explode received notions of what "Iranian music" means. They would do this in collaboration with Berlin's CTM festival, boasting every relevant permission from the authorities. And they would do it in a magnificent concert hall directly underneath Azadi Tower.

Ebtekar's office is in a ten-storey building in central Tehran, built by his architect father 60 years ago. Family photos sit on his shelf, framed next to copies of Ebtekar's music on vinyl and heavy books with names like The Synthesizer and Electronic Music And Sound Design. In another room are two cabinets that still hold his father's architectural sketches. Ebtekar is 46, his dark hair and beard turning grey from the bottom up. He has the demeanour of a friendly teacher with a sly sense of humour—because that's what he is. When he's not working on music or touring, he teaches students how to produce on Ableton in this office.

Though his roots are in Iran, Ebtekar has lived most of his life abroad. Born in Hamburg, he spent his early childhood in Iran before his family moved back to Germany. There his early obsession with the strange sounds of '80s pop led him to start a teenage band who would practise covers of Front 242, Depeche Mode and Nitzer Ebb. At 17 he moved to California, where he got seriously into music production and secured his first major release, Electric Deaf, on Warp Records in 2002 under the name Sote. In Farsi, sote simply means "sound."

Ata Ebtekar

After years teaching computer music and sound design in the Bay Area, Ebtekar felt a desire to return to Iran. In 2005 he came to Tehran hoping to make music there. Barring a fruitful meeting with Alireza Mashayekhi, a revered classical composer and pioneer of early electronic music, Ebtekar struggled to settle, and returned to America. A while later, he received an email with some music from a young Iranian producer named Siavash Amini. Ebtekar found one composition so beautiful it made him cry. "I was so happy to see that a younger musician from Iran is doing this kind of stuff from inside the country," he said.

In 2013 Ebtekar returned once again, and this time he stayed. He released a string of albums like Architectonic on Morphine Records and Hardcore Sounds From Tehran on Opal Tapes. He also finally met Amini face-to-face, who introduced him to a talented group of young artists hoping to create something new. Together, they drew up the blueprints for SET, which would become the country's leading experimental electronic music collective.

Pouya Pour-Amin's family home is down a dusty side street in Haft-e-Tir, an artsy neighbourhood of central Tehran. The easiest way to his studio is through the courtyard, a sun-trap where vines coil around barbed wire and plastic bottles of homemade cherry jam sit by the door. The studio has been used by Pour-Amin and his musician friends for 12 years, and it looks comfortably lived-in, with faded posters on the walls, musical equipment lying around and an air conditioner that splutters as if it's about to give up.

I entered the studio with Rabih Beaini, a bear of a man with a thick beard. Once known for his techno output as Morphosis, he now concentrates on live shows and the curation of his Morphine label. He had spent the last few days rehearsing for a SET performance with Pour-Amin's ensemble. Beaini's taste in music reaches far beyond the West, and he is a frequent collaborator with Unsound and CTM. At his home in Berlin, he has a collection of instruments from around the world. In Iran he set his sights on a tar, a string instrument often used in Persian classical music. After days of rehearsing together, Pour-Amin had offered to trade his own tar for Beaini's well-travelled looper and pedals. Pour-Amin's tar was gorgeous, with camel-bone inlay and a resin pick that sat snugly between the instrument's two bowls. Beaini held the instrument and caressed it lovingly. He fluttered his fingers over the strings and looked up, eyes bright as a child, and said: "Fuck, the quarter-tone placements on this thing are amazing."

Rabih Beaini, Pouya Pour Amin

That evening was the first night of the 2018 SET festival, and some of the organisers and artists came to Pour-Amin's place for lunch. Sara Bigdeli Shamloo and Nima Aghiani, who perform as 9T Antiope, were there along with Siavash Amini. Pour-Amin's beaming mother put out a generous spread of Persian dishes. Everyone seemed very relaxed in Pour-Amin's home. "It's like a second home for us," said Amini. "Or maybe a first home."

With his long black hair and goofy laugh, Amini, 31, has the manner of an absent-minded intellectual. But get him on a subject he feels strongly about and you're confronted with a sudden eruption of passion, principle, and, often enough, anger. One of his friends described him as "a pessimist wearing an optimist's coat."

It was Amini who explained how the artists who organise SET first came together. As a kid he played guitar, and one day saw a boy wearing a Metallica necklace at school. This was Hesam Ohadi, who now produces as Idlefon. The two became fast friends and started to jam together. At university they met Nima Pourkarimi, who goes by the name Umchunga, and the three started to make electronic music. By 2010 they had produced an album together called Spotty Surfaces, a collection of pretty electronica and twitchy beats which has aged well. Many call it the first album of electronic music from Iran.

Hesam Ohadi

Artists from different backgrounds—classical, hip-hop, punk, metal, even visual arts—heard the album and gravitated towards the group. They converged around electronic music, but to this day their productions are very different. There is no one, defining "Tehran sound." Sara Shamloo explained: "Just because it's a scene, it doesn't mean everyone is following the same thread. We all have our own angle." She is one of the only female electronic musicians close to the group. While there is a gender balance in terms of listeners, this is not yet reflected among artists. Her independence is evident in her style: even when forced to cover up, a puff of hair, dyed yellow and pink, peeks out from under her hijab.

The group of friends began staging concerts in coffee shops around the city, and soon gained a loyal following. But when it came to bigger events, especially festivals, they were disappointed by Tehran's cultural landscape. They wanted to make an event that treated its artists well, that prioritised art and community over money and prestige.

Amini explained to me how he first discovered Ata Ebtekar's music. "I was going through Warp's discography and realised there was an Iranian guy releasing on Warp." This was a big deal—every member of SET cited Warp's catalogue as a major influence. Amini contacted Ebtekar in 2011, sending him tracks that he later identified as drone music. "At the time I didn't know a drone scene existed," he said. "I didn't know what I was doing was called drone."

When Ebtekar moved back to Iran for good, it wasn't long before he met the group of younger artists. His familiarity with big figures from the scene, like LFO's Mark Bell, thrilled them. Amini said it was exciting to have someone from the outside enter their world. It was also reassuring that he was taking an interest in them. Amini said: "It was kind of confirmation that we were doing OK."

Ebtekar was just as excited. "We all clicked," he said. "It was decided very fast—let's do something. The first goal was to provide a platform for ourselves as artists, then make a circle around us and show people that this can be done."

Siavash Amini

The first edition of SET festival was held in 2015. While none of the founders have official roles, their skill sets are impressively comprehensive for a festival organised entirely by artists. Ohadi makes sure the visuals are top quality. Ebtekar, Amini and Shahin Entezami obsess over sound quality. Amir Ashrafzadeh designs the posters. Behrang Najafi is skilled with social media. All of them pitch in with general organisation, including the founders I didn't get a chance to meet properly: Shahin Saba, Arash Akbari and Ronak Rezaei.

They arranged four days of performances in that first year, and sold out almost every one. Each subsequent edition of SET also sold out. This is thanks to the group's growing reputation, but also to the large and engaged audience for contemporary culture in Tehran. Ebtekar recounted a concert in 2016 when SET invited Dutch sound artist Thomas Ankersmit to perform in a Tehran gallery. This is an artist whose performances centre around abrasive frequencies that, according to Ebtekar, have "broken major windows in a Milan gallery." Despite the difficulty of the music, almost the entire crowd stayed for the whole performance. Ankersmit was delighted by their dedication. "Afterwards they went outside and they were complaining, saying, 'What the hell is this? He's crazy, he's trying to hurt us!'" recalled Ebtekar, "but they still sat down and listened until the end."

None of the SET crew are able to make a living from their music. Ebtekar teaches, while Amini, Ohadi, Akbari and Ashrafzadeh run Codon Interactive Media, a studio offering audiovisual content to commercial clients. On a scorching day I visited the Codon studio to learn more about the practicalities of staging a music festival in Tehran. Though it looks directly out onto the motorway, the studio is an oasis of peace, mercifully air-conditioned, with filter coffee and take-out food in perpetual rotation. One wall is painted a cheerful yellow. There are board games, tech books, VR headsets and plastic models of movie monsters on the shelves. A model lighting rig Ashrafzadeh was working on hung in the middle of the room like a spider's web.

One of the most intriguing aspects of SET is that everything they do is completely legal, with all the relevant government permissions. When Western media covers Iranian culture, it tends to peddle a familiar narrative: "Underground artists put on illegal events to resist oppressive regime." SET complicates this story, refusing the outright vilification of the government and dispelling myths that creativity is irrevocably stifled in today's Iran.

To be clear: there are many restrictions to personal freedoms in Iran. Women are required to cover their hair in public spaces, alcohol is illegal, the official punishment for homosexuality is death, certain minority groups like members of the Bahá'í faith are systematically persecuted, and many websites are blocked by the government, including Resident Advisor and all major social media platforms except Instagram.

Then there is the question of dancing—or not dancing. While mixed gender audiences are allowed to attend events together, dancing is not permitted. This is not a written law, but Ohadi said it stands "somewhere between rules and social norms," with a special emphasis on the prohibition of women dancing in front of men. This July, an 18-year-old Iranian woman made international headlines when she was arrested for posting videos of herself dancing on Instagram. A few days later she appeared on public television, issuing a tearful apology.

There are also specific limitations on the music industry. Ebtekar recently launched Zabte Sote, a record label dedicated to Iranian sound artists, with a 42-track compilation showing remarkable range and talent. If he wanted to release this in Iran, it would have to be submitted to two separate government committees to confirm the music is decent and the lyrics are moral (electronic music without lyrics can slip through the censors more easily). This process can take up to two months and, once released, managing payment and distribution with other countries is nearly impossible. For this reason, Ebtekar teamed up with Stephen Bishop from Opal Tapes to produce the physical copies, but he will be unable to sell them inside Iran.

Staging events is also complicated. To book international artists, SET organisers must give the authorities examples of the music to be played. While they have never been rejected, SET members have received unsolicited critiques. Once, the committee insisted they market their event as "experimental," saying: "This is not music, these are just sound effects." An exasperated Ohadi replied, "Yeah you're absolutely right, so can you let us have a permit to play our sound effects?"

Ebtekar acknowledges the challenges of organising a festival in Iran. But his can-do attitude is unshakeable. "I'm not saying be ignorant, be stupid, look away." But the worst thing, Ebtekar said, would be to give up. "If you lose hope and you don't do art and if you don't go on living your righteous life with your family, then you're gonna go crazy."

On the first night of the 2018 SET festival, we descended into the bowels of Azadi Tower, through concrete chambers that resembled a starship deck from an '80s sci-fi movie. This was where the first two evenings of music would be performed, with every act playing live. A young, trendy crowd gathered in the auditorium, on plush seats beneath a ceiling of illuminated glass painted impressionist swirls of yellow and blue.

The first act was mHz, real name Mo H. Zareei, an Iranian sound artist and musician based in New Zealand. His show surprised me before it even started—when Zareei walked onstage the entire audience jumped up, cheered and burst into applause. I couldn't recall ever seeing such an enthusiastic response at an experimental music show. Zareei kept energy levels high with glitchy beats and the melodies of frayed electronics, as if a chorus of printers, servers and radars had joined up to programme dance music according to their own logic. The complex rhythms showed off the clarity and power of the soundsystem, and while the crowd couldn't dance (anyone trying would probably have been stopped or ejected by venue security), everyone I could see was tapping their feet and bobbing their heads.

Zareei was followed by Umchunga, AKA SET cofounder Nima Pourkarimi. His show was more challenging, an opaque session of swirling drone punctuated by rattling bass throbs, punishingly high frequencies and stretches of vague noise. I struggled to lose myself in the long performance, but given the enthusiastic applause at the end of the show, I was in a minority.

Ebtekar was set to play the final show of the night. I was sitting near his family, who had come to see the Iranian debut of his current project. Behind me was his wife and seven-year-old son Arta, who is a big fan of his music. Arta always asks to hear his dad's albums in the car, no matter that it's music many adults would find difficult. He often wanders into the room while Ebtekar is tweaking synthesis methods, pays him a compliment, and wanders out again. Before his father's show Arta was practically vibrating with excitement in his pulled-up socks and Star Wars t-shirt.

Ebtekar would be performing "Sacred Horror In Design," a project commissioned for CTM Berlin in 2017, which incorporated live visuals, traditional Persian instruments and electronic production. Together with his group—visual artist Tarik Barri, Arash Bolouri on the santour and Behrouz Pashaei on the four-stringed setar—Ebtekar put on a momentous performance. Taking the shape of a dramatic interplay between delicate strings and alien electronic processing, it was unlike anything I'd heard before. Barri's visuals were in constant flux, a display that blurred the lines between form and pure abstraction, shifting from molten patterns to futuristic renderings of Islamic geometry; the blueprints for a mosque in the 30th century.

Both instrumentalists were virtuosic. At one point Bolouri moved to a second santour, processed so that each string hit triggered an ungainly bass response, as if some fragment of traditional Persian music was duelling with its own monstrous shadow. Pashaei's setar solo was pure thunder, as Barri conjured a deep vortex of cycling colours behind the players. On the final track, "Holy Error," Bolouri drew a bow along the outside of his santour, creating a chilling screech as if he was slitting the instrument's throat. I didn't realise I was holding my breath until it caught.

At the end the auditorium exploded into applause. Ebtekar took a bow and waved to Arta, who was jumping up and down next to me, and looking around the room as if to make sure that everyone was giving his dad the praise that he deserved.

The next day I walked around downtown Tehran. I picked my way through the crowd on Jomhouri, a major shopping street. Everyone was crowded onto the shady side of the pavement, passing shopfronts with the latest fashions, the female mannequins headless to avoid showing their hair. On the pavement I saw a man selling broken pieces of amethyst, another slicing a mirror into small squares with a sharp knife, and many stalls selling the cold, perfumed drinks that are a national tradition and essential in the stifling summer heat.

While Tehran feels like a modern capital, it lacks the obvious charm of other Iranian cities like Isfahan, Rasht or Shiraz. The city feels defined by its roads rather than its public spaces, and it seemed that many of the young, arty, middle-class people I met spent their time shuttling between private air-conditioned spaces.

I had last visited Iran in 2014, and it felt like the capital had changed a lot in that short time. In many ways it seemed like the city had loosened up. Fashions had changed: more men than I remembered had skinny jeans, tattoos and earrings, while many young women wore their hijabs perched ever more precariously on the backs of their heads. There was more music in the air—several times I entered the metro to find a moody-looking young man in a lumberjack shirt with a guitar, serenading passersby. While my perception as an outsider is surely skewed, Siavash Amini agreed with me on the rise of the crooners. He quipped: "If you're walking down the street, look into any hole in the street and you'll probably see a singer-songwriter with a guitar."

Some changes in Tehran have made life harder. Throughout summer, electricity was cut off in many neighbourhoods for two hours a day to save energy. In order to combat the city's notorious pollution, cars with odd and even number plates are only allowed to drive through the centre on alternate days. In winter the pollution gets so bad that schools sometimes close to protect children's health.

More than anything, Iran is experiencing an intense economic squeeze. Trump's withdrawal from the nuclear deal sent the value of the riyal plummeting, leading to major protests. Bloomberg reported in August that the value of the currency had fallen 70 percent since May. On August 7th the US reimposed unilateral sanctions on Iran, and Trump tweeted: "Anyone doing business with Iran will NOT be doing business with the United States."

In a coffee shop, Amini showed me a series of angry messages Trump exchanged with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, culminating in Trump threatening Iran with "consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before." This threat sent the Iranian currency into a tailspin. As his savings plummeted in value, Amini worried he would no longer be able to afford the basic costs of living as an artist. I reflected on how in the UK these tweets are presented in the news as an amusing geopolitical soap opera, but how deadly serious they were in that cafe.

When Amir Ashrafzadeh was preparing his lighting for day two of the festival, he went looking for 200 metres of wire, which he found in a shop. Coming back the following day to buy it, he found the price had risen by 20 percent in just 12 hours. Two months later I asked some Iranian friends if the situation was improving. The answer was no. Amini told me that some basic supplies, like medication and diapers, were becoming scarce in the capital. When I texted a Tehrani friend asking how she was doing, she replied: "Waiting for the good days to come."

"You can feel it most here," said Amini. "In a country far, far away a president changes, and then your whole life turns to shit in a week." While he isn't worried about the possibility of the war Trump threatened, Amini predicted "a war-like situation. It doesn't matter if there's bombs falling. People are going to get really poor and really miserable. They're going to die. That's war."

For young, liberal Iranians with the means, thoughts often turn to leaving the country, at least for a few years. Nima Aghiani and Sara Shamloo, of the duo 9T Antiope, moved to Paris in 2014. Others told me they were thinking of moving to Paris, Berlin or Canada. Hesam Ohadi and Pouya Pour-Amin just want to leave Tehran. Pour-Amin told me in his studio of the specific problems that come with living in the capital: "The quality of life here is terrible, and everything is expensive. Living in Tehran is lose-lose."

While several core members of the SET crew expressed a desire to stay in Tehran, to continue building a cultural scene that is worth staying for, the economic crisis makes this option seem ever more gruelling. Amini suggested that some Iranian musicians who have not travelled abroad imagine life as an artist in Europe or Canada is easier than it actually is. "I don't blame anyone for leaving," he said. "It's hard. But I've seen the other side as well. It's hard too."

On the second night of the festival, everyone was talking about the imminent "blood moon," the longest lunar eclipse of the century. Rising brightly above the marble of Azadi Tower, which seems to glow at night, the moon was still unobscured when we went in for the first performance.

The first act, Temp-Illusion, was one I had been curious to see. The duo of Shahin Entezami and Behrang Najafi are supposed to be SET's biggest crowd-pleasers. The collective often have to bring in extra chairs when they perform. It was the most breathless and fun performance of the festival. The pair wore their influences proudly, with a sound that blended IDM, hip-hop and electronica. The set was big on drama, whipping the seated crowd into a frenzy. The whole auditorium roared with approval at every drop. Afterwards Najafi told me that the best feedback he gets is when listeners say they were unable to sit still.

The secret to Temp-Illusion's huge appeal lay, I suspected, in their rhythms. The drums were exquisitely detailed—they didn't just hit, they flexed, bent, strained and ricocheted. Each beat left a unique texture trail behind it, gritty or airy, reminding me of a comment Najafi made before the show: "We've barely used a single sound twice. I think we repeated a kick drum somewhere once."

I wondered if being unable to dance made me listen more closely. Perhaps the intense detail of the music was even designed with a seated audience in mind. Still, when Temp-Illusion perform in a club outside of Iran, as they will at Berghain for the next CTM, there's sure to be mayhem on the dance floor.

Shahin Entezami, Behrang Najafi

After the show we emerged to find the moon looking yellow and bloated, but still no eclipse. Meanwhile, the second act, 9T Antiope, were preparing their live set with visuals from Austrian video artist Rainer Kohlberger. Their music usually combines Nima Aghiani's violin and electronic processing with Sara Shamloo's jazzy vocals, but this would not be possible in Iran—the idea of a woman singing live before a mixed audience is highly contentious, and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to get a permit allowing Shamloo to sing. The pair decided to see this restriction as a creative challenge and reconfigured their live set to make something new.

The most immediate change was how uncompromising their music had become. Noxious blasts of noise tore through the speakers. I had met with the pair a few days before, where Shamloo had told me: "We love the ability to affect people physically with frequencies. We want them to feel it in their ribcages. We want it to be brutal and ugly and big and angry." She looked at Aghiani, as if she had forgotten something. "And beautiful," Aghiani added with a nod.

The exhausting intensity made the interludes of beauty, both soothing stretches of choral singing and Shamloo's own prerecorded vocals (spoken, not sung, according to the rules), all the more valuable. Shamloo's English-language lyrics are an elliptical poetry, at times ornate or confusing, at others striking and mysterious. They drifted out like space communications picked up by a distant antenna. One passage went: "I'm coming to life and my body's lying on the cold concrete floor. Can't feel my feet, can't feel my head. Something quite stubborn is pushing beneath the skin of my forehead. It smells like brass, tastes like brass."

Sara Bigdeli Shamloo & Nima Aghiani

We poured out into the full eclipse, the air thick and intoxicating, electrified by the performance, smoking and chatting in the witching hour. We returned for the final act, which was one of the major international bookings, Robert Henke, AKA Monolake. Henke performed a live set with his back to the audience, as if he were captain of a starship we had all boarded. "I don't want to play to them, I want to play with them," he told me later. "I like the idea of being close to the audience and I never understood what the benefit is of having a DJ at a festival ten metres behind a fence."

His set made use of his technical expertise to play with the surround sound of the auditorium, highlighted in a drum roll which rippled from the front of the room to the back, swallowing the audience like a wave. The rest of Henke's performance was not to my taste, leaning into hushed ambient and a closing volley of polite techno, but his invitation to Tehran was not purely as a performer. Because he is a co-creator of Ableton, the SET team thought it would be valuable for Henke to give a talk to local producers. Ebtekar told me that everyone in Iran uses a cracked copy of Ableton Live. At Henke's talk the next day, attendees listened eagerly as he described his Ableton workflow and took them through his audiovisual projects.

Robert Henke aka Monolake

Just as locals were thrilled to hear Henke speak about his process, Henke found his time in Iran illuminating. "I perceive a cognitive dissonance," he told me, "between the image of the evil upcoming nuclear power, Iran, and the images of satellite photos of nuclear facilities and evil old men with beards, versus people who look and behave like people who are interested in our type of music in Germany or the UK or wherever. You don't see the image of 20-year-old women listening to electronic music in the public discourse of Iranian politics. But these people are here and they're affected by inflation rates that go insane. They're affected by large-scale world politics and it's so obvious that they are not interested in being part of this conflict. They just have to be there."

Part of the reason that SET was able to book major international artists like Henke was its collaboration this year with Berlin's experimental arts festival CTM. They first collaborated in 2017, when three Iranian acts played in Berlin. This time SET returned the favour, inviting CTM to help curate and organise their festival in Tehran. CTM have the relevant pedigree, having collaborated with festivals across Europe and America as well as in Siberia and Indonesia.

CTM cofounder Jan Rohlf described how many in Germany are "still very concerned and anxious" about Iran. He saw the collaboration as "a cultural exchange to counter the stereotypes that are embedded in our brains." In turn, Ebtekar told me he found working with CTM inspiring: "If you look at the Iranian younger generation, it's good for them to see that an Iranian independent festival can collaborate with a big international festival like CTM. It brings hope." It will continue to do so in 2019, when SET visits CTM festival in Berlin.

For its final evening, SET moved to a theatre in downtown Tehran. The venue was smaller, befitting the intimacy of these final two performances. First was Rojin Sharafi, who mixed performance art with electronic production, making abstract sounds with a red metronome, a reel of duct tape and a laptop, like a survivor of the apocalypse scavenging for leftover scraps of sound. It was a curious, unpolished show, but it left me with interesting questions about how we expect to see sound being made at concerts, and what that means.

Rojin Sharafi

The closing act was Rabih Beaini and Pouya Pour-Amin Ensemble. I had no idea what to expect. Beaini entered and set himself behind a modular synthesiser, while Pour-Amin took an electric double-bass, with Sardar Sarmast on trumpet and Deniz Tafaqodi on keyboard. The room was hot and the mood was heavy, as if something wild had been left over from the previous night's eclipse. Over three extended tracks, the instrumentalists conjured a sepia soundscape, with the smoky trumpet adding an element of danger. Beaini added noirish melodies and huge washes of reverb that blurred distinctions between individual instruments.

For the final song, Siavash Amini came onstage for a guest spot on electric guitar. He began coaxing peals of murderous noise from the instrument. The jazzy group transformed into an improvised noise band, melodies merging into a sludgy primal storm of sound, overpowering in its volume and its fury. As the song stretched out relentlessly, I saw about ten audience members get up and leave. One man near me was rocking back and forth in his seat violently clutching his head, as if in a trance. As the last shreds of noise dissipated, the crowd rose dazedly to applaud. Amini put down his guitar and his mother rose from her seat and ran over, claiming him in a proud embrace.

The applause stretched out, and the crowd wandered out into the lobby to chat, unwilling to let the evening end. Meanwhile, members of the SET crew slunk off to a dark stone corridor that doubled as backstage. There they stood, smoking a couple of cigarettes, beaming at each other, not saying very much at all.

On my last day in Tehran, I emerged from Tajrish metro station into the strong morning sun. After a big wrap party I was feeling worse for wear, but determined to make it to the festival's final discussion group. Everyone on the escalator turned to watch a man at the station entrance, singing opera in an impressive baritone. Next to him a man was selling baby animals out of cages, including tiny rabbits, ducklings, chicks and guinea pigs. A group of young women in chador, a loose black cloak that leaves only the face exposed, were giggling and cooing at the bunnies.

I walked on a quiet path beside a river. There wasn't much water, but I expected there would be come spring, when melting snow floods down from the mountain. I passed a man sleeping on a pile of melons in the dappled light. At a bend in the path another man hunched on a bench in a cheap cyan shirt, smoking something from a glass pipe. He looked like he was about to collapse, but jolted awake just before hitting the ground. I heard the soft, insistent song of a cuckoo overhead.

When I arrived at the Music Museum, a stone and wood building set in a peaceful garden, I found the others were as exhausted as I was. The group decided to cancel the first talk in favour of a leisurely breakfast. I was impressed that they could run a festival like a military operation, but still recognise when everything needed to be deferred for coffee.

When the panel discussion began, conversation bounced between questions of scaling a festival and going international, before landing on a topic that quickly grew very heated—one that affects every Iranian artist performing abroad, and every non-Iranian promoter who might book them.

Of the Iranian artists I spoke with, all who had played abroad questioned whether they were booked because of their nationality rather than their music; to add, as Amini described it, an "Iranian flavour" to the programme. Several also reported Western promoters being surprised when they did not play traditional Persian instruments—Sara Shamloo said that some journalists commented on "Persian motifs" in the work of her first band that she neither intended nor heard. Artists from all over the world must negotiate audience's stereotyped preconceptions of their home countries, but the situation for Iranians seems extreme.

The Western electronic scene has recently latched onto emergent styles of music with obvious local characteristics: Lisbon's kuduro, gqom from Durban, the sprawl of avant-club sounds currently emerging from Latin America or East Africa. In a world of drum presets and industry standard production software, it can be easy to feel, in the words of Robert Henke, that "the last thing the world needs is more streamlined, globalised electronic music production," and that it's great when artists twist their own musical heritage into bold new shapes.

The problem seems to occur when Western listeners expect specific local sounds when artists from that country play—expectations often grounded in stereotyped ideas of foreign cultures. When ambient label Flaming Pines issued Absence, a 2016 compilation of music by Iranian composers, Australian academic Tony Mitchell wrote a confused critique that lamented the lack of "Iranian characteristics" in the music. In a fiery response, Amini wrote: "As for not using traditional Persian instruments, most of us saw [a] computer or an Atari before we saw a tar or a setar. Does anyone ever write that it makes a Western musician's music somehow less 'Western' or 'authentic' because he or she doesn't use the piano? I don't consider my own music somehow less Iranian because I have chosen to use a guitar."

At the end of his piece, Mitchell questioned whether the Iranian artists are "justified in avoiding political statements," as if they have some obligation to be political, and their only possible mode of artistic expression is resistance. In a conversation at CTM last year, Amini commented wryly: "It's an accepted notion in Western media that Iranians are either runaway rock stars or oppressed rap singers." Iranian artists have been hurt by simplification and misrepresentation in Western documentaries and journalism. The truth of most Iranian artists is far less "newsworthy," said Amini. "These narratives don't exist here. Those are Western narratives imposed on a few Iranians."

Frustration with this kind of coverage led some of the artists I interviewed to bristle when I asked what was unique about their music, given its political and geographical context. Some told me that their work would sound the same no matter where they were from. Visual artist and SET organiser Amir Ashrafzadeh is all too familiar with prejudice—to the extent where American teammates in online video games regularly disconnect when they hear he's Iranian. "We try to avoid calling ourselves 'Iranian artists' because we think we're part of the world's general scene for electronic music," he said. "We wanna be known for our art. You don't need to tell everybody, 'Look I live in a shitty place and now this is my art.'"

The machinery of the European music industry encourages artists from outside the West to play up their foreign identity, to define themselves by their exoticism. If it means more bookings and money, it's understandable why some agree to do this. As Rabih Beaini, an artist who has had to negotiate his own Lebanese identity throughout his career, told me: "It doesn't matter what you're doing, all that counts is how well you tell your story." Between artist bios, lazy journalism and PR, it can be unsettling for an artist to see their identity taken out of their hands, especially when this intersects with problematic patterns in how Western media perceives a country like Iran.

The clamour of voices that rose in this heated debate under the Music Museum showed that each artist, Iranian or otherwise, had their own complex relationship with their national identity. Many thought that being understood through the lens of their nationality would mean their art would not be engaged with meaningfully. But others argued that it's possible for an Iranian artist to be understood within their context and according to the value of their art. All it takes is a nuanced approach, and an abandonment of easy preconceptions of what it means to be Iranian, or anything else. It depends on the listeners being able to contain the complex contradictions of reality. Amini understands this, saying, "You cannot be a one-sided person in a society like this where everything might change in an instant." He should know. He makes challenging albums of experimental drone, but also did a remix for Carl Craig.

Nobody really agreed on anything, but the door had been opened for everyone—artists, promoters and journalists alike—to interrogate how they presented themselves and how they understood others. The conversation wound down and people drifted away. With a little extra time before my flight home, I decided to visit the Music Museum with a Danish photographer, Malthe Ivarsson, who has been friends with the SET crew for years.

In the museum we explored long rooms filled with traditional Persian instruments from all over the country. We looked at the bulbous spider body of the kamancheh fiddle, the cinched waist of the six-stringed tar and the mottled sheepskin stretched over the belly of the tombak drum. Each was displayed under soft lighting in hushed corridors like religious idols. This, I thought, is what most people expect when they hear the words "Iranian music." It's what Ebtekar subverts in his performance, and what the other SET artists avoid altogether. This position has historical precedent. Amini told me that as a student he went to see pioneering electronic composer Alireza Mashayekhi give a lecture, where he described how his instrumentation and influences ranged indiscriminately from East to West.

In the gift shop we found a row of tiny wooden music boxes. Turning the metal handle of each one, we heard ancient Persian songs, echoing centuries of tradition in plinky chimes. I wondered what such music boxes would sound like hundreds of years in the future. Would they still replicate those instruments upstairs? Would they still sound so melancholy? Might the dystopian rhythms of Temp-Illusion, the amorphous ambience of Umchunga or the curdled noise of 9T Antiope one day be considered worthy of a music box? In that lecture that Amini heard, Mashayekhi told them not to worry about trying to sound Iranian. He said: "You can't be more Iranian than you already are."

Listen to a playlist featuring some of the best contemporary experimental music from Iran.