The following by composer Kiawasch Sahebnasaq will appear on the liner notes of Not Like That!! TehranAvenue is using it courtesy of the author and Ava Khorshid label.

Bringing together ingredients of the modal music of Iran, rock, electronica and the rhythms of ethno and pop in ways that a consistent structure is arrived at has been the preoccupation of plenty of musicians since time immemorial and it will remain so in the future.

As far as I remember, this preoccupation has been with {Ramin Behna} -- later Ramin Behna and his ensemble, and before that Ramin Behna and AVIZHEH -- in the form of morning (after 1 pm, I mean) tickles, evening and at late night (after 1 am, I mean) kicks. (A kick here is a unit of perseverance.)

Some of those tickles appear in the guise of the BEHNA Ensemble creations in their delicate playfulness, their devilish jocularity and their innocent, childlike gaze, which wins the heart of all, only to leave many hanging in mid-air in the middle of a track and at the very same moment that they have been won over, like in "Debonair I" in this album.

Much like a miniaturist, Behna has arranged the array of his motley synthesizers and, with the help of the noble tar of {Behrang Baqaii}, is giving you a frolicy six/eight beat accompanied by the drum of {Kasra Ebrahimi}, the percussion of {Sina Khoshkbijari} and the bass of {Babak Riahipour}, all of which feed into the computer of {Alireza Rahiminejad}.

The seemingly simple narratives of the Behna Ensemble hide complex thematic, harmonic, and rhythmic designs as well as improvisations on tar, bass and drums, which sometimes hint at circular rhythms of ancient musical traditions, like in "Charmez-Bass", where the base rhythm reminds you of the four-beat (charmezrab) compositions of Abolhassan Saba and Hossein Alizadeh (the bass and drums test the limits of charmezrab and sometimes even render it impotent only to inject the obsession with rhythm and rhythm again).

In "Like That" a musical ethnic conflict is in full swing. Each ethnic force finds its nook and is busy with it own whimsy, to reach the ideal land of no-man's-land and to resolve things in peace.

In this album we enter a world of flashbacks that the musicians of Ramin Behna's generation (including this pen) are familiar with. We are a generation of transition though not of oblivion; a generation of memories, of keeping track of fun, sweet, and honeycombed moments in a piece of music; a generation of amity and love, for which "values" were still of some value, keeping the ways of our predecessors alive, safeguarding hope for future generations. Ours was the generation of biting into the red of a watermelon, of apple pulps next to the piano, of Pink Floyd (what generation wasn't!), of Alan Parsons, Supertramp, Deep Purple, Richie Blackmore, Vangelis, etc.; the generation of coffee houses and late night juice bars (after 1 am, I mean).

"You reap what you sow," the saying goes. The Behna Ensemble has an uncanny affinity to uncanny affinities. It has planted the seeds of its obsession in this musical garden and the fruit is warmth, congeniality, amity and all the good and hard-to-find things that are sure to please their listeners.

At the end, I must add that this album was made possible through the ingestion of a thousand kilograms of rock, pop, Behna-vista melodies and a potpourri of mystic, modal, maqami, Latin (surely African) colors and beats, along with more than 576 kilograms of pasta, 17 boxes of (non-alcoholic) beer, nearly 480 liters of coffee, 753 liters of tea, 210 kilograms of feta cheese, and more than 488 loafs of sangak, barbari, taftoon, white and dark bread, not to mention 85 kilograms of cold cut, 53 kilograms of the best hot dogs the country has to offer. God be willing, the proceeds from the sale of the album will cover some of these expenses.

You can be sure that the Behna Ensemble will continue scratching their heads in gestation and so long as they do so we will enjoy the fruits of their labor.