Saba Alizâdeh is an Iranian, Netherlands-based master of the kamancheh – the Persian spike fiddle – and a composer who blends classical Persian traditions with contemporary Iranian music and avant-garde, electronic experimentation. He is the son of the tar and setar virtuoso Hossein Alizâdeh.

Rituals Of The Last Dawn offer a much-needed musical food for the soul in bitter times, and as Alizâdeh says, music knows how to heal what words cannot. It features Alizâdeh free improvising with two musical partners. The «First Ritual» is with Italian guitarist and electronics player Pietro Caramelli and was recorded at NoiseWorks in Leiden in July 2025. Caramelli’s prepared electric guitar, modular synthesis, and live processing gently embrace and ornament Alizâdeh’s vibrant and spacious kamancheh sounds, and together they weave an evocative, highly immersive, and vulnerable ambient soundscape.

The «Second Ritual» is with Brussels-based sound artist, lap steel guitarist, electronic player, and sound artist Liew Niyomkarn, and it was recorded in her studio in July 2025. Niyomkarn is experienced in exploring layers of sound, repetition of notes, harmonic spectra, and resonances achieved through traditional acoustic string instruments such as the zither and lyre. She enriches Alizâdeh’s contemplative playing with enigmatic, delicate, and reverberating layers of the processed lap steel guitar, and both create a most beautiful soundscape with an arresting emotional power.

Alizâdeh calls this album his «offering to every sunrise that lifts us, to every sunset that humbles us, to the fragile beauty of every passing light we live to witness, and to the countless souls whose dawns and dusks were stolen by cruel wars».

Eyal Hareuveni

Saba Alizâdeh (kamancheh), Pietro Caramelli (guitra, electronics), Liew Niyomkarn (lap steel guitar, electronics)