Prior to his performance, the flat-cap adorned Sote strolled around the premises of Salford’s premier garage-turned-club. He cut an observant figure – whilst Rob Brown of Autechre drew the steadier stream of admirers seeking hugs and photographs, Sote, (real name Ata Ebtekar) remained a more enigmatic presence. Despite winning less overt fandom, he was positioned as the evening’s main event – and given his veteran status in pioneering electronic music, he very much warranted such esteem.

In the late 1990s, Sote began drawing attention from some of the most forward-thinking labels in experimental music. In 2002, a release on the seminal Warp Records launched a prolific career notable for consistently innovative approaches to electro-acoustic experimentation. Whilst Iranian classical traditions and influences have remained a constant presence in his work, the past five years have seen Sote reflect more deeply than ever on his relationship with Iran.

2022’s Majestic Noise Made in Beautiful Rotten Iran showcased his “harmonically maximalist” approach, blending booming riffs with contemplative moments of ambience. His 2024 album, Ministry of Tall Tales, had moments of both delicate beauty and subtle menace, as he delved into themes of “corruption, oppression, and murder,” inspired by his emotions of “frustration, anger, confusion, helplessness, and fear” towards his socio-political surroundings.

Sote’s latest release for Diagonal Records, Sound System Persepolis, marks one of his most ambitious projects yet. It reimagines Greco-Romanian composer Iannis Xenakis’ Persepolis, originally commissioned by the Shah of Iran in 1971 to commemorate 2,500 years of the nation’s founding. Sote delivered five tracks of electronic mayhem, each with a title comprised of jumbled up letters and locations relating to Iran (Zagros Mountains, Caspian Sea etc).

Whilst Sound System Persepolis may lack the grandiose budget of Xenakis’ original work, it compensates with an unrelenting commitment to experimental, chaotic intensity – effectively tailored for emphatic live performance – a vision Sote vividly brought to life in Salford.

The event was a showcase from Diagonal Records, celebrating “13 years of foolishness”. They curated a line-up of both emerging talents and familiar faces. Label-founder Powell’s set was a sensory overload, with relentless strobe lights and clouds of sweetly-scented smoke reducing visibility to a hazy blur. Not Waving’s audio-visual live set delivered the most dance-orientated performance of the evening.

Dancing to some of Russell Haswell’s selections may require more imagination. Presenting a piece he called a “classic”, titled ‘Always Check Their Instagram’, he unleashed some of the most horrible sounds I’ve ever heard. Being hit by walls of shrieks that escalated into such high frequencies they crossed the range of human hearing was perhaps not on everyone’s cards for the night. Some unsuspecting audience members shuffled out to get a stiffer beverage, others unashamedly plugged their fingers in their ears. There were a few scoffs and laughs and shakes of the head.

Most attendees maintained awkward expressions of stoic intellectual interest, despite obvious discomfort. A few enthusiasts (the chronically unhinged) with high tolerance for tinnitus lapped it up. Never has noise felt so… noisy.

Whilst I’d like to think it was a satire on the brain-rot inducing panopticon of doom-scrolling, I suspect the title was more a poke at those who had come along expecting a boogie and been met instead with Dentist Chair Simulator 2k24. Next time do your research, or as Haswell mumbled, “I hope no one’s wearing an Oasis t-shirt”. Oddly comedic and undeniably impressive in its extremity, it did for me at least, provide a cathartic, if over-indulgent, palette cleanser amidst the night’s offerings.

Sote’s performance came as the penultimate act of the evening, followed only by a more understated DJ set from Autechre’s Rob Brown.

A bright laser diagonally bisected the room, casting a faint green glow over the seated Sote as he began winding up his gear. The opening moments introduced his palette of intricate synthetic textures. Sote’s music is as unique in its structure as it is in instrumentation. The primary rhythm of his opening was patient and deliberate, thumping away with weight and depth. Meanwhile, fleeting, rapid-fire rhythms seemed to ricochet off the central beat. These snappy echoes were always slightly discordant – looping and coiling, occasionally dragging slower and appearing in conflict with everything else.

The set’s progression was far from linear, yet strangely hypnotic in its unpredictability. Patterns, whilst elusive, emerged through this kind of echoing interplay. The patient pacing steadily mounted in volume and complexity, giving way to some of the frantic noises of ‘ADTVESSPXLUT’. Scraping, wailing tones were interspersed with bursts of thumping techno bass beats. Just as the audience would begin to feel a sense of where things were going, Sote would throw another sonic curveball, stripping away tension and rebuilding it anew. His sound teeters tantalisingly close to alignment, only to veer off into unquantized irregularity and deliberate discord. Things always feel just one notch off-grid.

As the performance grew showier, the crowd responded, moving with the shifting energy. Strobe lights flashed sporadically, catching glimpses of Sote’s evident enjoyment – a faint glimmer of a smile beneath his beard and his head bobbing in time.

Sote struck a key balance in his set – a weighty, muscular performance like this, delivered to a predominantly male crowd, could have easily veered into cliched machismo or obnoxiously intellectualised territory. Instead, it managed to find equilibrium, especially during moments of strangeness or levity, like the characterful see-sawing synths from ‘AFRCNRNGSSPXCASPIAN’.

Elongated whines, abrasive rattles, beats that melted into each other until they sounded like purring; every sound felt alive. Filled with elements in conflict and frequently improvisational, Sote harnesses the real dramatic capacity of live performance. The ever-shifting soundscape he creates requires focus and engagement, but the reward is immense. It’s a fatty, fully-realised display of rhythms, textures and ideas, and it made for an experience that lingered long after the final vibrations faded.