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Two sound inventors from The Hague, Netherlands. Iranian Rouzbeh Esfand and New Zealander Patrick Stewart are ESFAND.

File as: organic hybrid of Folk and Techno.

A unique blend of traditional Iranian sounds and contemporary electronic music, featuring vocal features by renowned Iranian artists. Ecstatic dance music to get lost in.

Esfand is the final month of the Persian calendar, ending with the Nowruz spring festival. ESFAND is also a band, founded in 2020, consisting of Rouzbeh Esfand and Patrick Stewart. A duo that fuses traditional Iranian Folk elements with Western beats to create something completely new.

Their debut album "Piltan" is a flamboyantly danceable statement. No crossover kitsch. Pure instinct music. ESFAND is century- and boundary-crossing music.

The two learnt musicians met during their studies at the conservatory in The Hague. Pat sold Rouzbeh a book on audio production. They went for a beer – the first steps of a new duo.
They went on producing contemporary classical music and created their first songs in collaboration with Iranian artists.

"I'd love to say we had a plan. But there wasn't one," says Rouzbeh. "ESFAND started as my master's thesis. We selected all the samples from a purely musical perspective. The Folk element in our music is significant, but it's not our job to preserve the purity of the culture. We don't discard Iranian traditions; we simply keep the ones that fit best. At the end of the day, they are all just sounds."

For his master's thesis, Rouzbeh studied the millennia-old rituals and customs of various Iranian ethnic groups. "Piltan" is a sonic journey through a vast country full of cultural peculiarities: starting with the southern Zār rituals of the Persian Gulf, moving to the equestrian people of the Bakhtiari in the southwest, on to the Qashqai in the west and to the Kurds in northwestern Iran with.......
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