Gelareh Pour - Voice, Kamancheh, Qeychak Alto. Brian O'Dwyer - Drumkit. Featuring Brett Langsford - Guitar.
ZOJ - album launch
FRI JUL 18 7:00PM - 8:00PM
Platform Arts Performance Space
$35 +BF General Admission
$25 +BF Concession
$15 +BF Blak Tix
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Learn how to visit Platform Arts, including standard opening hours and full accessibility information, via our contact us page.
Wheelchair access is via our Gheringhap St entrance ramp. Unlocked, accessible bathrooms available on both ground and first floors.
The exquisite genius of Gelareh Pour, we simply are not worthy.
– Nick Cave
ZÖJ’s sophomore release crafts an evolving sonic landscape where the edges between sound, silence and nature dissolve. Attuned to the moment, the music unfolds slowly and deliberately; drawing you in, asking you to listen deeply, and feel fully.
This isn’t background music; it’s an invitation to be present.
ZÖJ is not just a duo but a conversation—between worlds, between past and present, between the known and the unnameable. Since 2016, Gelareh Pour and Brian O’Dwyer have been making music under this name, though their collaboration stretches back further, to when they first began tracing the edges of each other’s sound in 2012.
Their second album, Give Water to Birds, is an expansion, a deepening. Here, guitarist Brett Langsford enters the space, not as an addition but as a shifting of light, a reshaping of the landscape. His playing pulls at the edges, offering new textures to ZÖJ’s intricate, intuitive world. It is music that holds both silence and sound, absence and presence, the fleeting and the enduring.
Gelareh’s haunting vocals, Brian’s fractured rhythms, Brett’s murmuring guitar and the nature that surrounds them create a place outside time, a language beyond words. Inspired by Persian poetry, it is a quiet reckoning—an offering, fragile yet unyielding, carrying echoes of lifetimes and the silence they leave behind.
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Gelareh Pour is a renowned Iranian-Australian musician, known for her exceptional skill as a Persian Kamancheh and Qeychak player, as well as her talents as a singer, composer, and instructor. Gelareh began plying music at a young age, continuing her musical journey in Iran at the Art University of Tehran’s conservatorium, where she earned her BA, before furthering her studies with a Masters of Ethnomusicology at The University of Melbourne.
Her academic pursuits have led her to conduct research on ‘The Lives of Iranian Women Singers in Diaspora’ at MCM, shedding light on the professional experiences of Iranian Women singers before and after migration.
Gelareh's musical prowess has taken her across the globe, with performances spanning Iran, Central Asia, Europe, and Australia. Since settling in Australia, she has become an integral part of the country's vibrant music scene, collaborating with some of its most innovative musicians, organisations, and festivals including Womadelaide, MONA FOMA, The National Folk Festival, SITUATE, Australian Art Orchestra, Punctum, Rubiks Collective, Cultural Infusion, ANU, Finding Our Voice, La MAMA Theatre, University of Melbourne, Boîte, Multicultural Arts Victoria, Monash University, RMIT and more.
Gelareh’s flexibility and interest in different cultures and genres sees her working across a variety of music scenes, including, improvised, experimental, cross-cultural, classical, electronic, soundscape, film-score and new Australian music.
