Mareux

Mareux is the electronic project of Los Angeles musician and producer Aryan Ashtiani. Raised in Mar Vista, Ashtiani discovered European dance music through Polish MTV broadcasts watched on illegal satellite dishes during childhood summers in Iran. The hooks stayed with him, followed by teenage obsessions with French electro, house and the darker corners of electronic music. Mareux began around 2011 with washed-out synth-pop experiments uploaded to SoundCloud. Even while Ashtiani stepped away to pursue healthcare, he continued recording. Early songs found an audience across Eastern Europe, and his 2015 interpretation of the Cure’s “The Perfect Girl” eventually became a global, double-platinum breakthrough. By then, Ashtiani had already spent a decade building Mareux. In 2023, Lovers From the Past brought together songs written across several years, framing heartbreak, obsession and distance with cavernous vocals and piercing synths. Nonstop Romance followed in 2025, shifting toward something more playful and social without abandoning the love songs at Mareux’s core. Now working on his third album, Ashtiani builds songs by sampling abandoned sessions and pulling drum sounds, melodies and synthesizer patches from different periods into the same recording. Drawing from every era of Mareux in pursuit of dark, smoky electronic music, he wants the songs to sound just as strong in 20 years. — Jack Angell