Arian Shafiee
Music Residency

Arian Shafiee is a Brooklyn based guitarist/improviser most known for his playing in the off-kilter dance punk band Guerilla Toss. Inspired by aspects of non-western tuning and extended techniques, he crafts moments of dense, shimmering harmony and aggressive gesture through a unique approach, hinging classical impressionism to no-wave and early minimal music. Growing up with Iranian/Turkish parents, he peripherally absorbed various middle eastern musics, blurring their lyrical and harmonic mainstays into his writing and improvising. His two forthcoming albums, Beauty Tuning (Hausu Mountain) and A Scarlet Fail (VDSQ) deal specifically with this synthesis of eastern inflections and traditional classical harmony. By using fretless, microtonal, and acoustic guitars, Arian aims to process these stylized genres into an organic music, free of idiom and convention. His current trajectory of work focuses on the deconstruction of middle eastern pop music, using technology as a means of producing episodic compositions which verge between synthetic and natural sound worlds.