Reza Safinia

Reza Safinia is a UK-raised, LA-based, multi-instrumentalist producer and composer whose work spans multiple genres ranging from electronic music to classical compositions for major film scores. He has worked with acclaimed artists such as Dr Dre and Kylie Minogue and scores the HBO Max show Warrior, as well as releasing his own music as an electronic artist and DJ.

After an eventful year including standout live sets for Robot Heart at the Renegade Burn and the recent live performance stream for Mixmag, Reza has officially launched his Music and Texture Imprint with a stellar release, “Funkbible (Re-interpretation)”, in collaboration with German heavyweight producers, Super Flu, that has garnered support from the likes of Pete Tong, Eelke Kleijn and Black Coffee amongst others.

Reza’s influences are a tapestry of romantic era classical music such as Debussy and Satie, and a shifting spectrum of electronica, melodic house and techno and shamanistic music. His textured approach fuses orchestra with contemporary production, exploring soundscape as much as harmony and melding the two to create a tactile journey in sound, as heard in his two albums Yin and Yang.

Yang is an electronic album peppered with live piano and cellos, and Yin it’s counter, a post-classical album, expressed in a contemplative arrangement of piano and cello, with glimpses of modern electronic textures appearing throughout. The albums are a holistic and meditative body of work exploring cosmic connections as well as the balance and polarities of the feminine and masculine energies present in us all.

Reza’s musical eclecticism is a reflection of his lifelong interest in Eastern philosophies and martial arts. As a yoga practitioner as well as a Daoist, the producer’s artistry is often expressed as a fusion of two worlds, marrying classical orchestration with elements of contemporary electronic music. This melding of diverse soundscapes allows for an immersive and cinematic experience in his music.

Reza’s love affair with music started at the age of five, when his aunt gave him a Barry White cassette… he was so entranced with every aspect of the music, from that famous silky vocal, to the sweeping string arrangements, rhythmic syncopations, the snare sound… He listened to that tape so many times, he had memorized every single arrangement of every instrument down to the cowbell on every song by his next birthday, when he moved onto Michael Jackson, but at this point Reza was already more interested in Qunicy Jones’ production and decided that’s who he wanted to be when he grew up. Shortly after that came a lifelong obsession with Prince which led to him writing his first songs on a Casio keyboard.

By his teenage years, Reza was making four track demos, delving deep into every genre of music, Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Run DMC, NWA, Guns N Roses, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, it all started mixing in his mind, informing his own artistic palette. Over the years Reza became more and more influenced by both electronic ambient music, and romantic era classical music.

On the one hand studying Schubert’s impromptus and on the other studying Aphex Twin’s approach to tweaking the hell out of a synth… all the while infusing the latent knowledge of soul, hip hop and rock from his younger days.

Some of Reza’s notable scoring work includes the feature film, The Trust, starring Nicholas Cage and Elijah Wood, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s Mercy, the Starz show P Valley, and the HBO Max period martial arts show, Warrior, originally conceived by Bruce Lee and produced by Justin Lin.

2022 will see Reza recording a new album and performing Yin and Yang as a live set, combining the electronic elements with the piano performance. He recreated his 1957 Steinway in a digital form by sampling the piano at different velocities and creating a sampler instrument to enable him to perform the piano elements live with the same sound he recorded. This set premiered at a standout sunset performance on the Robot Heart Bus at the Renegade Burning Man in September.