ABSTRACT
A host of ambient music pieces produced in Iran appeared on social media around 2010. Against all odds, these works started to gradually form a small ‘scene’ in the Iranian capital until around 2013. This scene has since been represented publicly and legally inside the country. It is also well known within experimental electronic music circles outside the country. In a politically forced absence of many art/music forms in the public domain since the 1979 revolution, the emergence and burgeoning of such an ‘avant-garde’ scene is significant. This article argues how the scene’s aesthetics, in the broadest sense of the term, can be understood as a locus for crystallisation of a concurrent resistance against and embodiment of an invasive, yet ambiguous, form of ethical-moral-legal control. This text also makes a case for how an interdisciplinary integration of ethnographic fieldwork within a practice-based research context in music/sound and anthropology, can contribute towards formation of composite methodologies that are beneficial to both fields.