Formed by two brothers, Mohammad and Mehdi Mehrabani-Yeganeh, raised primarily in the West, away from their family in Iran, Saint Abdullah is designed somewhat as an introduction to a different palette of sounds, creating a charged and anxious, but still assertive mixture of minimalist dub and Iranian samples. The two are particularly drawn to the sounds associated with Shia Islam, predominant in Iran but usually a minority in the Muslim world.
Saint Abdullah is part of the performance A forbidden distance, that has been commissioned by Berlin Atonal, Semibreve, Sónar and Unsound as part of The Crossing, a collaborative curatorial project supported by TIMES.