Zahra

Biography

Photo by Suzy Prior

Musician and leader of the Young Women’s Music Project (YWMP) – zhfatehrani.com

Zahra is a musician, composer, and performer who has been creating music for over 15 years. She is currently based in Oxford where she was born and raised as a second-generation immigrant, her father emigrated to the UK from Iran and her mother is Irish. Thoughts on identity run as an undercurrent through her work as she seeks to connect the different cultures she embodies through her creative process.

Zahra performs as a solo act, Despicable Zee, through which she has released the self-produced EPs Wednesday’s Child and Atigheh. It’s hard to confine these to a single genre. She threads layers and layers of lo-fi beats over sampled sounds you can never quite place, tied together by transient melodies that transport you to something like a reverie, a space in-between… perhaps this is the best way to describe her sound. It sits somewhere in-between spoken word poetry and echoed rap, in-between asking you to slow down to reflect, and inviting you to dance with its off-kilter rhythms. Even her lyrics explore what it means to be liminal. Lines are embedded with Zahra’s reflections on the experience of immigration and existing between cultures which are worlds apart. She weaves in samples from Iranian ballads, lullabies from her Irish mother and Iranian grandmother, and sounds of her son which she’s collected as he grows up, pockets of childhood captured in the quiet moments.

YWMP provides an inclusive, supportive space for young women to get together to make music, learn new skills, express themselves, and grow in confidence. They are based in Oxford, with a focus on working with young women aged 14-21 years old and community work.

YWMP has worked with hundreds of young people across Oxfordshire in a range of settings, building partnerships with schools, pupil referral units, hospitals, and organisations working with vulnerable young people.

They reach thousands of people each year through our gigs, events and partnerships. https://www.ywmp.org.uk/