Makan Ashgvari – In Rage We Dance

Makan about the album: “IN RAGE WE DANCE is about resistance. It’s about how the oppressed have danced, and are still dancing, through times of brutality. It’s about the body as a place of defiance. The collective heartbeat of those who hold hands and dance in a circle, rest hands on shoulders, and let the rhythm shape one body from many.

Remember the Kurdish people, hands clasped in unity, dancing Chopi. Remember the Dabke, a stomp of solidarity across Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. Remember how the Sepa dancers of Lorestan make ques and spin in circles. They’re saying with their bodies: though they try to erase us through history, we have each other. Together we rise, together we fall.

Also remember the cruelty these people face, being called terrorists while their homes are bombed. The racism they endure, and yet they always find a way to dance through it.

IN RAGE WE DANCE is about duality. The ignorance we meet, the violence, the hate. And the light we carry through the darkest nights. It’s a dedication to my people trying to light a torch in the darkest of nights. In the lightless alleys of Lebanon, the broken neighborhoods of Iraq and Syria, and the starving body of Gaza. We have had enough. And in madness, in grief, in rage, we dance.

After my album “To Trucks”, which was a sound journey through Iran, I tried to draw from the sounds of a vast land of oppressed people. The Darbuka, the voices of Kurdish singers, rhythms inspired by Dabke, and the powerful voice and groove of Cheikha Rimitti. Although I couldn’t travel and record in the lands that had my heart (as I did with To Trucks), my laptop became a way to travel, to listen, and to join these sounds, both in my head and in my electronic music.

My dream with this album is that one night, at a small party in Tehran, someone dancing to my music closes their eyes and feels the arms of their siblings in Herat and Beirut, Gaza and Damascus, Sulaymaniyah and Cairo resting on their shoulders, in solidarity. May this music tell the people who dance to it, the things I can’t say by words”.