Aida Shirazi is an Iranian-American composer and electronic musician working across acoustic and electroacoustic forms. Her music is described as “unfolding with deliberation” by The New York Times, and as “well-made” and “affecting” by The New Yorker. In her works for various mediums, Shirazi foregrounds timbre as a primary structural element, with influences drawn from language, literature, and nature.

Shirazi’s music has been featured at Manifeste, Wien Modern, Berliner Festspiele, Wiener Festwochen, ECLAT, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Mostly Mozart, Ojai Music Festival, TIME:SPANS, Istanbul Music Festival, and Tehran Contemporary Music Festival.

Shirazi is a co-founder and co-artistic director of the Iranian Female Composers Association (IFCA).

About the performance

The Third Room unfolds across three evenings in Callie’s sound studio. Drawing on electroacoustic composition, personal archive, and shared memory, the work moves through loss, longing, and displacement, both on individual and collective levels. Shirazi’s practice centres on the composition of sound through timbre, texture and spatialisation.

At the heart of the work are fragments of folk Bakhtiari and Mazandarani dance music, played at the burial of young Iranian protesters killed by the thousands during the recent uprising. They speak to the youthfulness of those lost, and to the ongoing resistance of Iranian society against a regime that strips families of their right to mourn.

For each evening, Rey Khatami joins Aida Shirazi as a co-author. A Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of performance, storytelling, and installation, Khatami builds dense, atmospheric spaces from text, voice, gesture, sound, and fragments of memory. The two artists share a decade-long friendship and a close personal history. This work grew naturally from years of exchange, candid conversation, and a shared sense of responsibility toward the realities they carry. In light of current social and political upheaval, the work has changed and evolved to reflect the unstable present.

aidashirazi.com