The story behind Skycabin is a twisting tale of Iranian histories, music videos, documentaries, and avant-garde sound design. Singer-producer-director Farbod Khoshtinat, now based in Los Angeles, makes up one half of the group and has created music videos for artists like Snoop Dogg, T-Pain, and Pitbull, among others. He also helmed an award-winning short film documenting the struggle for democracy in Iran which was aired for a meeting of the United Nations, the Directors Guild of America, and the Motion Picture Association of America.
Looking at Skycabin’s other half, Sepand Bahrami works out of San Francisco and spends his time as a sound engineer and producer. With well over a decade’s worth of experience in his fields, he’s found himself working on a number of studio and film projects and uses his training with guitars of all timbers to help inform his effort on all his ongoing aural endeavors.
The band was officially founded in 2020, but Khoshtinat and Bahrami first met in Malaysia 10 years ago and spent the next intervening years collaborating on various ideas driven by their shared musical adorations. Drawing from Massive Attack, Bjork, and Radiohead, they’re drawn to experimental electronics, trip-hop grooves, and warped R&B rhythms, finding common ground between these aesthetics and exploring the connective tissue that exists there. And on their forthcoming debut EP, SOMNIA, which the band will approach as a visual anthology, these influences are clearly felt and adapted to fit their own needs.
For their latest single, “INSIDIA”, the band creates a song that feels indebted to the vocal melodies of early ‘90s R&B while also finding the darkness within a strain of complicated electro-pop which they so obviously admire. The tempo never really gets out of hand, but there’s something quite remarkable about the momentum which it develops and sustains. The beat clacks away while Khoshtinat’s voice glistens and sways in the humid landscapes of the music – the fractured pop impulses leading astray all who hear them.
The song and accompanying animated video were inspired by Simone de Beauvoir’s Book “Ethical Seduction” and attempts to recontextualize these themes of seduction and identity for our modern times. Depicting the devil in paradise as he attempts to persuade Eve to turn her back on God, the clip is a haunting and hallucinatory embellishment which further cements their position as peddlers of psychotropic sounds and hypnotic images.
Watch the video below.
Skycabin’s upcoming debut EP, SOMNIA, is due out sometime soon. Follow the band on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
