Ash Koosha is an Iran-born electronic musician and producer, born Ashkan Kooshanejad. His music grows from recorded sounds that he stretches and reshapes, then organizes using his training in classical composition.23 After playing in rock and electronic bands, he developed a solo practice that balances deliberate composition with unexpected results from software. His later work with the software singer YONA explores how generated material can become a song through human selection and production.2456
Recordings
9 releases, oldest first. Select one for its details and sources.
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GUUD
Life & work
Early music and Take It Easy Hospital
Koosha began pursuing music seriously at about fifteen and entered the Tehran Conservatory at eighteen. He later recalled that discovering Mogwai and Sigur Rós on CDs changed his view of music, particularly Sigur Rós’s album Von. He wrote early songs in English because he found it easier to express his feelings that way.78
In 2007, a concert by his rock band Font led to a three-week jail sentence for Koosha and his bandmates. After Font closed down, he formed the indie/electronic group Take It Easy Hospital with Negar Shaghaghi. Their MySpace recordings brought an invitation to a Manchester festival and contact with the filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi. They worked with him on No One Knows About Persian Cats, which drew on their experiences of making music in Iran. While playing further dates in Britain, Koosha and Shaghaghi decided to stay and eventually received asylum.92
After they began making music separately, Koosha did technical work and produced for other musicians before concentrating on his solo work. Shaghaghi was still making his album artwork when I AKA I came out in 2016.10
Composing with recorded sound
Koosha treated his field recordings as objects: material to stretch, distort and reshape. Learning harmony and counterpoint gave him a way to organize the unfamiliar sounds that emerged from this processing. On his debut, GUUD, released in 2015, he allowed the computer’s unexpected results to influence the composition. He described the method as half control and half letting the computer decide, listening back to the details that appeared when he stretched a sound.34119
For I AKA I in 2016, he selected from about eighty finished tracks. He felt more confident about placing sounds: the noises were now where he intended them to be. He was also trying to adapt bandari grooves from southern Iran for electronic club music.12410
His way of imagining sound helped shape his interest in virtual reality. Koosha said that he had learned keyboard chords by remembering shapes, and that even after learning notation he continued to think geometrically. He wanted listeners to see the moving forms he imagined while making music.8 In August 2017 he presented AKTUAL in TheWaveVR. Nick Shelton worked on its animation and art direction with Strangeloop Studios and Aaron Lemke. The following year Koosha released the album AKTUAL, which he wrote and produced.1314
For the 2017 Chimera EP, he turned to archival field recordings supplied by the Tropenmuseum. He took part in Unlocking Sounds, a collaboration that invited artists to make new work from the KIT collection of ethnographic recordings held at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.1516
Voice and YONA
Koosha began YONA in 2017 as an imagined guest singer. He later explained that practical difficulties with recording singers, including long delays and the cost of bringing collaborators into the studio, had encouraged him to build a voice for himself.1718 He continued experimenting with his own voice too: on Unnamed in 2018, he sang in English and in an invented language built from a chart of related syllables.19
YONA offered another way to make vocal music. In 2018 its software generated sentences, melodies as MIDI information, and singing through text-to-speech processing. Koosha mixed and produced the final songs. He described the project as a narrow use of artificial intelligence to supply lyrics, melody and voice; human intention and taste still determined what was finished and presented. He worked with YONA on Return 0, released that year.65
For HALLUCiNATO, Koosha generated samples, sequences and melodies over two years, then prepared them for performance. In a session filmed at London’s 180 The Strand in 2020, with visuals by Isabella Winthrop, he finalized the arrangement while mixing live.17 The album followed in December 2020.20
He returned to earlier melodies on Ten Years of Variations in 2025, making variations and new arrangements of music he had written or released over the preceding decade. In October 2026 he released EgoDTH, describing it as another record with Yona, now “version 3.0.”2122
Sources
- 1Music | Ash Koosha · Ash Koosha
3 quotes
https://f4.bcbits.com/img/0033378190_10.jpg
Music | Ash Koosha
https://ashkoosha.bandcamp.com/
- 2Ash Koosha | Ninja Tune
4 quotes
On his release—and with Font now in effect shut down—Koosha formed Take It Easy Hospital, a new indie/electronic/pop band, with friend Negar Shaghaghi. They built up a big following on myspace and, off the back of that, were invited to play the In The City Festival in Manchester. The Kurdish-Iranian film director, Bahnman Ghobadi, got in touch around the same time, asking them to collaborate with him on a film about the Iranian underground music scene.
To say Ash Koosha is an Iranian-born, London-based electronic musician
Born Ashkan Kooshanejad, Ash split his early years between Tehran and Frankfurt, where his father worked in the printing industry.
The film, No One Knows About Persian Cats, loosely based on their own experiences, won the Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 2009. But Iran was entering another “destructive” phase, with a new crack-down on music. The band’s drummer was arrested and beaten, and the Iranian-American co-writer of the film, Roxana Saberi, was charged with espionage and sentenced to eight-years in prison. Kooshanejad and Shaghaghi were in the UK playing further dates and decided they had no choice but to stay, seeking asylum.
- 3I AKA I / Ash Koosha / Release / Ninja Tune · Ninja Tune
One quote
Working mainly with his own field recordings, treating each sampled source as a physical object, Koosha squeezes, stretches, distorts and moulds units of sound before using a background in classical music - both Persian and Western - gleaned from his time at the Tehran Conservatory of Music to structure and shape the result into affecting, original and often beautiful movements - a process he calls “finding geometry in sounds.”
- 4Ash Koosha is pushing electronic music into a virtual reality · FACT
3 quotes
It’s 50 per cent control and 50 per cent [letting] the computer decide. The method that I have is I put units and processing on the sound, and after that I listen back to what the computer has decided as well. When I stretch a sound there are random elements that pop out of the waveform. So it’s a mix of me controlling all these chaotic things and also respecting the randomness of sound
Then I started listening to classical music a lot and learning classical composition, like harmony and learning more about counterpoint, and that’s when I could structure those unknown electronic sounds and recorded sounds that I was manipulating with the computer.
I had around 80 tracks that I finished a few months ago and I thought, this is too long for an album, but let’s try to make an album out of it. It’s not so different from GUUD but I think in terms of how I’m confident with putting the sound in tracks, it’s improved. It’s not as experimental, I’d say. Whenever a noise goes where it goes, I mean it this time.
- 5Ash Koosha explains why robots won’t actually kill us all | The FADER
3 quotes
Why not get rid of the idea that the computer's self-aware and actually try to implement the smallest bits of randomization using whatever technologies we have access to? Humans are best at taste because we have intention in finalizing and presenting something. The computer can create arpeggios and melodies — parts that I don’t necessarily want to spend time on.
In a sense, it's very narrow artificial intelligence: one function is performed by a machine, and we collaborate with it as if it's a human. When you go to a studio to work with a singer, you end up with lyrics, a melody, and a voice. I tried to make these three elements without having a singer involved.
His collaboration with Yona has resulted in Return 0 , Ash’s upcoming album which will be released on his new label Realms next month.
- 6Speaking to Yona, the AI singer-songwriter making haunting love songs | Dazed
2 quotes
The vast majority of Yona’s lyrics, chords, voice, and melodies are created by software, with Koosha mixing and producing the final song.
Yona’s engine is comprised of a series of generative software that generates sentences, melodies (Midi information) and singing via a complex text-to-speech process,
- 7موسیقی ♦ چهار فصل - آرشیو روزآنلاین
3 quotes
من اشکان کوشا هستم، حدود هشت، نه سال است که موسیقی را به صورت جدی دنبال می کنم… یعنی حدوداً از پانزده سالگی… زمانی که تصمیم گرفتم تنها به موسیقی به فکر کنم.
و از زمانی که در هجده سالگی به کنسرواتوار تهران رفتم، دیگر موسیقی برایم جنبه عملی پیدا کرد… یعنی یواش یواش اجراهایم شروع شد…
وقتی که خواستم حس و حالم را در ترانه بیاورم، دیدم با زبان انگلیسی راحت ترم…
- 8Meet Ash Koosha, the Producer Using Synesthesia to Craft Boundary-Blurring Tracks
4 quotes
When I went back to Iran, and I was listening to the CDs on my Walkman back then it was the first time I got introduced to Mogwai and Sigur Ros. A lot of crazy stuff. That was one of the points that changed my vision in music, especially the first Sigur Ros album, Von.
It’s how I learned to play keyboard. I would make up shapes on the keyboard and memorize chords by shape.
When I went to conservatory I learned how to read music, but I still think in terms of geometry.
This is how I see music and it’s why I’m a little frustrated with the ways people listen to my music and can’t see what I see when I make it. It’s the reason for the VR. It puts people there with me.
- 9Ash Koosha: Conducting Destruction · Pitchfork
4 quotes
Burgeoning rock group Font had never played in public before, but lead guitarist Ashkan Kooshanejad and his bandmates still managed to draw a crowd of 600 to a private suburban villa.
this was Iran in 2007, and concerts featuring rock music and a mixed audience were strictly forbidden. More than 200 people were arrested that night, and Kooshanejad and the rest of his band were sentenced to three weeks in jail.
Kooshanejad and Shaghaghi decided to remain in the UK, where they eventually received asylum.
From listening to his debut album, GUUD , recently released on Olde English Spelling Bee , you wouldn't guess that he had a past as a rebel rocker—much less as a student of Persian classical music.
- 10This Is What It’s Really Like To Be A Musician In Iran | The FADER
2 quotes
Eventually [Negar and I] parted ways musically and started doing our own stuff. She still does all the artwork for my albums. I started doing technical stuff and producing for other people, and then eventually I started doing solo stuff.
One of the things that I think is going to be instrumental in making new stuff in the club scene is Iranian traditional grooves, like bandari [music from the south coast of Iran]. If you can translate them in the right way you can use those rhythm sections in hip-hop [or] in club music. That's what I think Lafawndah did in “Tan”, and that's what I'm trying to do on this album. Taking traditional sounds and adapting the rhythm.
- 11Guud - Album by Ash Koosha - Apple Music · Apple Music
3 quotes
June 5, 2015
https://is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Music128/v4/ef/66/1d/ef661d1d-536e-b8dd-259c-76e7b8e6415c/0642610484339_1448.jpg/1200x1200bb.jpg
Guud
- 12I AKA I | Ash Koosha · Bandcamp
4 quotes
released April 1, 2016
https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a0741748546_10.jpg
"recordLabel":{"@type":"MusicGroup","name":"Ninja Tune","@id":"https://ninjatune.bandcamp.com","additionalProperty":[{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"url_suffix","value":"?from=btl"}]}
I AKA I by Ash Koosha
- 13AKTUAL
2 quotes
Event in TheWaveVR 8.16.17
I worked on some shaders, particles systems, animation, and art direction with strangeloop studios and aaron lemke
- 14AKTUAL | Ash Koosha
3 quotes
released March 30, 2018 Released on REALMS records. Written, Produced and Mastered by Ash Koosha Artwork by Dalena Tran
https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a2373223485_10.jpg
AKTUAL by Ash Koosha
- 15Chimera EP
3 quotes
released July 14, 2017 All sampled sounds provided by the Tropenmuseum Mastered by Mahdyar Aghajani Cover Art by Negar Shaghaghi
https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a2091308719_10.jpg
Chimera EP by Ash Koosha
- 16Releases -
2 quotes
Done as part of the Unlocking Sounds collaboration with the Research Center for Material Culture and Tropenmuseum. Three artists were invited to create new albums based on the KIT collection of ethnographic field recordings held at The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.
Ash Koosha – Chimera EP (Ninja Tune)
- 17Fact Residency: Ash Koosha
2 quotes
YONA was initiated as a voice instrument in 2017 when I was recording an album and was wondering if I could have an imaginary guest singer
Filmed as part of our Fact Live series at 180 The Strand , Koosha’s performance of HALLUCiNATO features visuals by collaborator Isabella Winthrop , with a concept described as “a machine hallucinating in multi-sensory audiovisual narratives.” HALLUCiNATO is comprised of samples, sequences and melodies that were generated by Koosha over the past two years, prepared for performance, with the arrangement finalised when mixed live for the session.
- 18Extension of Self: Ash Koosha Talks - Ransom Note
One quote
I worked with singers that couldn't finish a song in two years, I didn't want to be angsty about it but I wanted the song and I don't have the money to fly in singers from New York or LA. On a personal level I built a singer for myself.
- 19Unnamed | Ash Koosha
4 quotes
'Unnamed' is a selection of unreleased songs written, performed and produced by Ash Koosha. He has used a mix of english and a made up language, made of a correlated syllables chart.
https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a2035023272_10.jpg
released May 30, 2018 Written, produced and mastered by Ash Koosha cover art by Ozge Cone
Unnamed by Ash Koosha
- 20HALLUCiNATO
3 quotes
released December 10, 2020 Cover Art by Ash Koosha
https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a3933263134_10.jpg
HALLUCiNATO by Ash Koosha
- 21Ten Years of Variations
4 quotes
What follows are variations and new arrangements drawn from melodies I’ve written or released over the past ten years.
released December 26, 2025
https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a2833068237_10.jpg
Ten Years of Variations by Ash Koosha
- 22EgoDTH | Ash Koosha
4 quotes
Another record with Yona (version 3.0) Hope you enjoy
released October 30, 2026
https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a0023392747_10.jpg
EgoDTH by Ash Koosha
- 23Listen to GUUD - Album by Ash Koosha | Spotify
2 quotes
Listen to GUUD - Album by Ash Koosha | Spotify
GUUD
- 24Stream GUUD by Ash Koosha | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
One quote
GUUD by Ash Koosha
- 25Listen to I AKA I - Album by Ash Koosha | Spotify
One quote
I AKA I
- 26
- 27I AKA I | Ash Koosha | SoundCloud
2 quotes
"permalink_url":"https://soundcloud.com/ashkoosha/sets/i-aka-i-1"
"title":"I AKA I"
- 28Return 0 | Ash Koosha
4 quotes
https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a4149058086_10.jpg
released on 21 September 2018 via Realms Artwork and direction by: Isabella Winthrop
released September 21, 2018
Return 0 by Ash Koosha
- 29Listen to Return 0 - Album by Ash Koosha | Spotify
One quote
Return 0
- 30Listen to Ten Years of Variations - Album by Ashkan Kooshanejad | Spotify
One quote
Ten Years of Variations
- 31Ten Years of Variations | Ash Koosha | SoundCloud
2 quotes
"permalink_url":"https://soundcloud.com/ashkoosha/sets/ten-years-of-variations"
"title":"Ten Years of Variations"
- 32Listen to EgoDTH - Album by Ash Koosha | Spotify
One quote
EgoDTH
- 33EgoDTH - Album by Ash Koosha - Apple Music
One quote
EgoDTH
- 34EgoDTH | Ash Koosha | SoundCloud
2 quotes
"permalink_url":"https://soundcloud.com/ashkoosha/egodthlp"
"title":"EgoDTH"