Iranian Underground Music Festival (TAMF) Launched

As you may know or not, after Islamic revolution in Iran, music became banned and something vicious! Pop singers left the country and started to continue their carrier at LA and it became Iranian wave of music in America. But after a while, Iranian Traditional music became legitimated as revolution supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini allowed such a music to be. Other genre of music such as Pop, Rock and etc. banned. Then they let just those music which had legitimating through “what they like” supervision! It led music to go underground as a movement in Iran which is different from other underground music movements in other countries, in definition!
I don’t want to go through Iran’s music scene but this is still the same to some extent.

In 2002 TehranAvenue website started an underground music festival through internet for those talents that never had chance to air their music. That was a revolutionary act. It named UMC (Underground Music Competition).
In 2004, the second festival launched as TAMO (Tehran Avenue Music Open). These two festivals were really competitions and had winners! But in 2005, they launched the third music festival, which wasn’t a real competition as TAMF 2005 (Tehran Avenue Music Festival). You can still listen to this festival songs and enjoy’em as they are still available online!
The special point about this festivals is that they provide songs to be downloaded, freely.
Finally the last festival, TAMF 2008 launched some days ago:

“What is known — to the West — as the Middle East is a sensitive zone of political instability, putatively governed by strongmen and opportunists. Compared to an Africa steeped in impoverishment, a European Union spiring for superiority, a Far East spreading its power and might far and wide, and a US recovering an innocent identity, the ME is a strategic point of contention and Iran an important actor in this geopolitical puzzle, guiding and fomenting political precariousness: Oil, Persian Gulf, and Nuke Reality.

But our country has more than layers of oil, natural gas, or traces of uranium; it has a young population, always in the shadows, and talents that represent it in the artistic and cultural domains. They remain unique in a world dominated by globalized fads and fashions. These talents are hidden to the outside world as well as to the governmental structures and private institutions that operate within the country, all of which make their peculiarities even more significant.

It is in this sensitive political context that the 4th TehranAvenue Music Festival convenes, introducing alternative music produced by Iranian bands, music that is not informed by commercial pressures from the outside nor explainable by trends that their counterparts in other countries are following.

We at TehranAvenue have walked the margins for the past 6 years, trying to bridge the gap that separates subcultures from the society at large. In this, we have tried to listen more than arbitrate, to present music without judging its content. The intention was for those who listened to it, to form their own ideas, for people in the know need to find its values, give it values, “evaluate” it, for music critics to offer their own interpretations, etc.

What more to say, then, than we will continue to be there, taping into this rich layer, which we think more valuable than any oilfield or uranium stock, and remaining true to our ideas and principles. In all this, we must first and foremost thank musicians for this other vein.”

p.s. I did participate in this festival under band name, Waqow.

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