About — Link Music Lab

Link Music Lab

Link Music Lab strives to be a catalyst for content creation that brings communities together through innovative and inclusive music.

Founded in 2009 by Mahmood “Moudy” Schricker, musician and ethnomusicologist, Link Music Lab is a Toronto-based artist collective & not-for-profit that strives to be a catalyst for content creation, bringing communities together through innovative and inclusive music. Link employs an ethnomusicological approach to collaboratively developing concert, recording and artist marketing initiatives with member artists at all levels of career. Link is rapidly moving to the forefront of contemporary artistic multiculturalism in Toronto - moving beyond its foundations in Persian music to facilitating collaborations that unite and cross-pollinate various cultures in entirely new artistic contexts by providing a testing ground for exploration of deeper roots through contemporary music forms. Over the past several years, Link has paired disparate artists in double-bill presentations (ie Shaho Andalibi (nay) + Aria Rostami (electronics), Saeid Shanbehzadeh (Nay Anban (bagpipe) + Michael Red (electronics) ) and encouraged genre-bending fusions with traditional/folk idioms and electronic beats. Link Music Lab provides artists with a platform to explore their music, truly blur cultural boundaries and explore the contemporary multi-cultural landscape of Toronto.

Link Music Lab gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Canadian Heritage, Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council.

Mahmood Schricker

Mahmood Schricker is a musician, producer and founder of Link Music Lab, which supports the promotion and creation of Iranian-Canadian music through genre-crossing collaborations and innovative series like Polotechnics and Experimental Link Series. As a Canadian-Iranian born of Austrian heritage, Schricker unites elements of the different worlds he is part of.

He has transformed the setar into an electronic instrument to expand the possibilities for Persian music to integrate minimal ambient and dub sounds with Persian melodies.

Schricker's debut album Null (2012) includes collaborations with a number of renowned Iranian-Canadian vocalists, including Mohsen Namjoo, Habib Meftah Boushehri and Mariam Tollar, which received positive reviews on Songlines. He has since released a number of EPs and singles as well as El Muerte (2018), a compilation of dark dub set to the backdrop of delicate and fragile melodies. Schricker has also produced soundtracks for Babak Jalali's Radio Dreams (2016) and Fremont (2023) acclaimed by The Guardian as "a sparse, loose-limbed jazz score [that] adds to the picture’s gauche charm."