Asha Ensemble

Arash Adelpour (born 27 August 1973) is an Iranian Musician, Songwriter, producer and sound engineer. He is best known for his cooperation with many Iranian musicians and has gained further recognition after the release of his well received Pendar album.

Early life
Arash Adelpour was born on August 27, 1973, in Kermanshah, Iran. His father, Hadi who was born in Baghdad, Iraq is of Kurdish origin. Both his parents were working for the Iranian national television network at the time. His father was a writer, presenter and a voice artist. He notably performed the first Farsi to Arabic dubbing in Iran. His mother worked as a teacher and news presenter. She played the accordion and had come third in the Kermanshah music competition.
Arash learnt English and music from his mother from a very early age. His parents gave him a melodica when he was three. He started to learn the accordion from the age of seven after he was able to hold it properly. He became interested in the guitar at the age of twelve but was only able to buy his first guitar after he graduated from high school.
During the high school years, Arash also developed an interest for psychology and parapsychology. He studied many books in this field and attended self hypnotism classes at Kabuk Institute but could not continue as his parents opposed hypnotism.
He then attended meditation classes by Dr. Reza Jamalian and NLP classes by Mojtaba Houraee.
Another significant thing during the high school years was the great interest he found in rock music, which prompted him to shift his musical style to rock. After he was finally able to get a guitar, he applied at the Tarpinian music school to take guitar lessons. However, they recommended him to go ahead with Classical guitar. As a result he started attending guitar lessons by Kazem Moazen who had a high profile at the time.
He experimented different styles including classical, jazz, blues, rock and heavy metal. His teachers for jazz and blues were Rafik Davoodian and Bahman Nasri. In the meantime he also attended music theory classes by Kambiz Roshanravan and started studying harmony, modern harmony, twentieth century harmony, forms, orchestration, and song writing.
Arash formed a grunge band in his freshman year at university. The band was called Brainwash and the members consisted of Amir Jalali and Amir Khaladj. Although their album never reached its final production but the songs were considered as highly acclaimed by local musicians in the same genre.

Music Production

1993 was the year that probably set the pace for his future career, when he met Payman Abdali who had shown interest in the Brainwash album. Payman Abdali who was an electronic music artist had good experience in music production and recording. This was when Arash entered a completely new genre and started learning about sound and sounds engineering. After Brainwash finally disbanded, Arash started to find his own style and this is when the experiments started. He tried to combine elements from rock, heavy metal, electronic, experimental, world music and fusion. He also started learning different folk songs from different regions. The puzzle was finally solved after he heard Ocean by Stephen Micus. He immediately knew what he wanted to do and that was to create a piece which would include all these styles that he had loved throughout the years and to perform them by an acoustic ensemble.

In 1994, together with Payman Abdali, they created a band called Aryo Barzin. Their first performance was scheduled to be held at the Iran Austria Cultural center (OKF) in 1997. Unfortunately, due to security reasons, the concert was cancelled. In the same year Arash worked on alternate tunings after he noticed that he can make his guitar sound like an Oud or Tanbour (which is the sacred instrument of Kermanshah), by changing the tuning and to play some strings like a resonator. This enabled him to play the traditional Iranian folk songs more the way it should sound.
A number of musicians were asked to play along these tunes with the tabla , flute, setar, santour, piano and daff. This ultimately led to the release of his album Ultimate Reality in 2012. He tried to implement his experiences with self hypnotism to be able to create the hypnoses. He also tried to make clear where each process would start and where it would end, so he wrote a story and each piece would represent a chapter of the story.
He has several other plots in mind which will be made in the near future. Sharing a single direction in several albums was the reason he chose Farneshin as a single title for the whole collection, in which Pendar is the first album of the collection.
Farneshin is the word Indo-Persians used to refer to the mediation sessions.

Sound Engineering
Arash started work at the local sales distributor for Professional Audio products of Yamaha in Tehran, in 2000. He started work as a sound engineer after helping establish the first offic