When ZÖJ walks into the studio, there are “no plans, no ideas, no structures”. The music that emerges is entirely spontaneous, made in the moment.

ZÖJ – Brian O’Dwyer and Gelareh Pour. Photo © Noora Ziaee

“ZÖJ is very much an ongoing conversation,” Brian O’Dwyer tells Limelight. “We both come from very different musical backgrounds, so we’ve had to learn how to communicate musically with each other in an improvised setting. The more we play, the longer it goes on, the depth of that conversation grows, and our understanding of each other’s language grows.” 

ZÖJ – from the Farsi word for ‘couple’ or ‘pair’ – is an experimental, cross-cultural duo, a musical meeting between Iranian-Australian musician Gelareh Pour on vocals and kamancheh and percussionist O’Dwyer. In May, they released their third album, May The Devil’s Ear Be Deaf, and this month, they’re hitting the road with it on an East Coast tour before setting their sights on Europe in late October.

May The Devil’s Ears Be Deaf was recorded while the duo undertook the Soundweavings residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada; O’Dwyer calls it “a bit of an accident” – a recording project for Banff’s audio engineers’ residency, the music wasn’t originally intended to be an album.

“Before going to Banff, we were working on our second album, Give Water To Birds, with guitarist Brett Langford; for a good six months, Gela and I hadn’t played as just a duo. So they put us in the studio, and we’re sitting across from each other and we suddenly had a lot to say to each other. It just all came out. Later, they sent us the mixes and we thought, ‘there’s a record here’.”

That recording is all but untouched in the final product: one take split into four tracks. End-to-end, no overdubs, exactly like it was in the room. 

“[This record] is the most active of our music,” says O’Dwyer. “In some parts, we throw down pretty hard at each other. There’s a kind of flippancy in that playing. We were having fun, we just kept pushing each other along the way. I think all of that energy and freedom we were feeling was because we weren’t sitting there thinking we were making a record; there was no red light fever.”

ZÖJ – Gelareh Pour and Brian O’Dwyer. Photo © Noora Ziaee

When it comes to live performance, ZÖJ work in reverse to a traditional band; they improvise in the studio first, and then figure out how to capture that music live, while still leaving space to improvise and feed on the energy of the room.

“We always say it’s a triangle – it’s Brian, me, and the audience,” says Pour. “The music we do is quite improvisational, and connection to the audience is a huge part of it.”

May The Devil’s Ears Be Deaf is the fruit of more than 10 years of musical conversation between Pour and O’Dwyer. Between now and then, the ZÖJ sound has been shaped by their journeys as individual musicians and evolving musical ambitions.

 “With kamenchech, I’m becoming more experimental, freer,” says Pour. “In Persian classical music, there’s so many rigid ideas about what the music coming out of this instrument should sound like, even when sitting across different genres. I feel I’m finally breaking those rules – I’ve always tried, because I’ve never liked rules – but, even if we don’t like it, they shape our decisions about the next note to play, even if you don’t realise it.”

“I feel like I’m doing more rule-breaking in this record; I’m finally finding this extension into my instrument without being jailed by these expectations. It’s about building that trust between me and the way I play, just letting go in the moment.”

Pour also layers her vocals live on the tracks; for her music and poetry have always been intertwined. She brings an armful of books from her collection of Iranian poetry to the studio with her, picking material on the spot to use as lyrics.

“I’ve grown up with my dad’s library, I’m really lucky. He’s always had so much poetry, and he read so much to us. Iranians are breathing with poetry; every time they fall in love, they express it with a line of poetry,” she says.

“I open the books and read them on the spot in the studio, and if I feel in that moment that they resonate with how I feel, then I’ll sing it.”

ZÖJ. Photo © Sung Hyun Sohn

May The Devil’s Ears Be Deaf features poetry from M. Azad and Hushang Ebtehaj; Pour calls them “beautiful poets”. M. Azad’s Termites is a poignant portrait of fragility in the face of conflict, picked before the outbreak of the 40-day war; ZÖJ pays tribute with a vocal-led work; delicately-textured, yet visceral, powerful.

“There’s this uncanny thing that keeps happening where Gela will pick poems that seem to come true, often in unfortunate ways with things that are happening in Iran. We play the works live, and these words are really heavy now. They’ve hit the world in a way that makes them make more sense,” says O’Dwyer.

The cover art was created by Tehran-born artist Siamak Sharifan, one of Pour’s school teachers, who now lives in Canada. It was mastered by Murat Çolak, who was undertaking the engineering residency at Banff; in a medley of ways, May The Devil’s Ears Be Deaf is inextricably tied to where it was created.

“The album is very much this snapshot of this time and place. Everything just fell beautifully into place, which is very much what the ZÖJ trajectory is. In some weird way, it feels like we never plan anything but we’re always doing something, if we’re open to ideas and connecting with people,” says O’Dwyer.

This upcoming European tour is a perfect example – it snowballed from an invitation from Melbourne band Tropical Fuck Storm for a set in the Netherlands’ Le Guess Who? festival to a successful WOMEX application (ZÖJ will be the ninth Australian act to appear at the festival), to an offer to perform at Norwegian global music festival Tromsø World after a WOMEX committee member saw their entry. ZÖJ had no plans for another Europe visit after returning from another tour in May.

We’re very opportunistic – we just see what comes up, and if it feels natural, we just go with it. That just makes our sound very raw and honest. Whatever we are on that stage, that’s how the music is going to sound,” says Pour.

“We were in a location that we’ve never been – those mountains, the surroundings, that amazing studio – and we’re evolving as individual musicians. There are parts of this new album that are so pure and in-the-moment, and I don’t know how I played them – I wish we’d filmed it so I could see. It’s funny; through music, we understand what we are.”

ZÖJ performs at Arts Academy, Ballarat (13 September), Lot19, Castlemaine (20 September), Local Edition, Glebe (25–26 September), Melbourne Recital Centre (29 September) the Newkind Social Change Conference, Redbank (3 October) and The Chapel, Queenscliff (10 October). More information can be found here.