Mamak Khadem
Forever Seeking

Show Description

"Khadem was extraordinary … drawing her listeners in via the pure, emotionally communicative powers of her voice. Little-known and not yet recorded in a fashion that fully matches her live impact, she is one of the wonders of world trance music."
- Los Angeles Times



Mamak Khadem, the lead singer of the cross-cultural Persian fusion ensemble Axiom of Choice, has performed all over the world, including the Skirball Cultural Center, the Smithsonian Museum, and the House of Culture (Berlin) and has been a featured performer on numerous film and television scores, including "The Peacemaker", "Traffic," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", and "Battlestar Galactica". She has also recorded with Turkish singer Omar Faruk Tekbilek on the album Alif, with Jamshied Sharifi on A Prayer For The Soul Of Layla, and with Tulku on Season of Souls (later compiled on the Buddha-Bar series.) In her new solo recording "Jostojoo" (Forever Seeking), produced by Jamshied Sharifi, she aims to create music that is deeply connected to the Persian classical and folk music she has studied most of her life, but liberated from dogmatic considerations of form, instrumentation, and lyrical content. Inspired by Mamak's travels throughout the Middle East, the music is based on melodies from not only various regions in Iran, but from related musical cultures that share similar tenets and timbres. Mamak adapts Persian poetry to carefully chosen melodies from her country's folk and classical repertoire. The roots of her work are in the soil of tradition; its diverse melodic sources branch out across time periods to create a canopy of fresh interpretations.