Pouya Pour-Amin is a multidisciplinary artist with over twenty years of experience in music, composition, sound design and performance. Born in Tehran in 1983 into a family that worked in the arts, Pouya grew up in a creative environment. His mother was a puppeteer and actress, his father was a cinematographer, and his grandfather was an instrumentalist who played the tar – a traditional Iranian string instrument. Pouya began learning music when he was five years old and by his late teens he was making his own music.
As a university student, he began to study computer science, music and theatre, but dropped out three times because he felt that the studies and academic system did not have much to offer him. He continued to study through self-learning and private teachers. Pouya played the guitar, but his love for the low frequencies led him to take up the double bass, which he coincidentally discovered while studying at the Tehran Conservatory. Later Pouya joined the contemporary chamber orchestra, The Camerada Orchestra, where he spent a decade of tremedous musical growth under the guidance the conductor Kayvan Mirhadi, who had also been his musical teacher. His very first works as a composer were performed by Mirhadi’s orchestra.
Looking back, Pouya’s grandfather, Akbar Jeddikar, and the conductor of the Camerada Orchestra, Kayvan Mirhadi, were his biggest inspirations growing up:
— They were both very special people to me, opened my eyes to the worlds of music and literature and became my window to the world beyond the strict religious Iranian society, he says.