Maral: Aural Histories

For producer and DJ Maral, sampling is a deeply personal affair.

“I see myself more as a listener than a producer,” she reveals over video call on a bright LA morning. “I’m always looking for that three to five seconds of a song that makes you feel something deeply. The nostalgia or memory of an emotion within the music – that’s what I start my work with.”

By taking a heart-first approach to production, the Iranian-American artist has carved out a distinctly intuitive and experimental sound for herself over the past three years. Since her 2019 debut, Mahur Club, Maral has taken snippets of the Iranian folk music and poetry she grew up listening to, and repurposed them as glitchy sound experiments to bring the Persian classical repertoire to the dancefloor.

Read the feature in Crack Magazine.

[This piece was published on 16/11/22]