Mehrnam
For Your Consideration - Grammy Awards
For your consideration
Dislocated Pulse
Mehrnam is a kamancheh player, singer, and composer working at the center of a Middle Eastern psych-rock record built between Tehran and the diaspora carrying it forward.
Best Global Music Album
Dislocated Pulse
“Dislocated Pulse” is the debut album from composer, singer, and kamancheh player Mehrnam Rastegari, performed with a quartet of NYC-based musicians rooted in Persian psych rock. Bowed kamancheh and folk-rooted vocals anchor the record in centuries-old storytelling, while microtonal electric guitar, fretless bass, and drums carry it into contemporary terrain.
Best Global Music Performance
Naz
"Naz" moves to a natural, irregular dance rhythm, like a dislocated pulse. Tension and release drive the track, as psych-rock distortion and jagged grooves meet the microtonal edge of kamancheh, building to vocal yodels at its peak.
Artist Statement
I left Iran in 2022 carrying a kamancheh and years of training and no real sense of what came next. As a woman making this music at home, there was rarely enough space or support to do it in full. Here, that space had to be built by hand.
Dislocated Pulse is what that building sounded like. It's psych-rock, and it's also centuries of Persian storytelling, refracted through NYC musicians who didn't grow up with any of it, folk melody next to distortion. Nothing about it moves in a straight line, and I didn't want it to. As an Iranian, queer, diasporic artist, dislocation isn't a metaphor I reached for; it's the actual shape of how this music, and I, arrived here.
I hope you hear the pulse underneath it all: irregular, insistent, still going.
Notable Placement
“The debut album by Persian kamancheh virtuoso and composer Mehrnam Rastegari is a short but sharp statement, brimming with confidence and style.”
Charlie Cawood, Songlines Magazine
“…centuries-old Persian storytelling with a fearless psych-rock edge.”
Anne Connor, The Sound Cafe
Mehrnam Rastegari
Kamancheh, Voice, Composition
