Iranian Music

In collaboration with Brendan Perry, Lisa Gerrard is half of the duo Dead Can Dance, which started releasing arty goth rock on the 4AD label in the mid-'80s. Gerrard began her solo career with the 1995 release The Mirror Pool, which contained a lot of work that wouldn't fit comfortably into the DCD oeuvre. Combining these fragments with music that she composed and arranged digitally before reconfiguring them into scores that could be performed, it also draws on a composition by Handel and traditional Iranian music.

This is a marvelous experiment in contemporary, Middle-Eastern-flavored electro-acoustic music. O'Hearn seemed to be embarking on a new direction in his musical career with this thoughtful yet sensuous blending of ancient and modern modes of expression.

A multi-talented producer of music for films, television, and video games, Iranian-German composer Ramin Djawadi honed his considerable talents alongside contemporaries like Klaus Badelt, John Debney, Harry Gregson-Williams, and Steve Jablonsky while working for veteran composer Hans Zimmer's Remote Control Productions film score company. He worked as an assistant to Badelt before venturing out on his own with the RZA-assisted score for director David Goyer's Blade: Trinity (2004). He continued to work with Goyer, providing music for both film (The Unborn) and television (FlashForward), earning an Emmy nomination for the latter. In 2008 Djawadi, a longtime fan of the Marvel characters, provided the guitar-heavy score for director Jon Favreau's big-screen rendering of Iron Man, and in 2011, he provided the memorable (and oft-covered) theme and incidental music for HBO's massively popular fantasy series Game of Thrones. Subsequent film scores have included Clash of the Titans, Red Dawn, Pacific Rim, Warcraft, and The Great Wall, while his work in television expanded to vampire horror show The Strain, sci-fi techno thriller Person of Interest, and HBO's sci-fi/western hybrid Westworld. ~ James Christopher Monger