Following our March review of the album "Ashegham Bash" from the band Khak, we at Zir Zamin had a chance to briefly chat with their bass player Konstantinos Kostis online, regarding some of the questions that we had, the answers for which were not available on their site. And here is the content of our conversation.

Guitarist Lily Afshar, hailed by the Washington Post as "remarkable, impeccable," is the winner of the 2000 Orville H. Gibson Award for Best Female Classical Guitarist. Chosen as "Artistic Ambassador" for the United States Information Agency to Africa, she is the winner of the Tenth, Eleventh, and the Twelfth Annual "Premier Guitarist" awards respectively, awarded by the Memphis Chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, Inc. Lily is the Head of the Guitar Program at the University of Memphis where she was awarded the 2000 Eminent Faculty Award.

Z.Z:Why did you guys call your band Meera?

Farzam Rahimi: MEERA is a name of a girl's character from a novel that I had read during my high school years. And frankly, after 14 years, I still have not been able to forget her. I was quite influenced by that book. Word for word MEERA means "gone with", however, there was no specific reason for us picking this name. Who knows, maybe in the future we will find the reason. I just suggested it to the rest of the guys in the band, and after some nagging they accepted it.

Z.Z: Please tell us when, how and why did you start a band called Vazhe?

Arash:I started the Vazhe project in 1989 simply as a result of a request by one of our friends to perform live at this underground party that he was throwing in Los Angeles. Jayce and I lived in San Francisco and so we started preparing for this one show with a couple of tunes that (Hadesseh and two more songs which I forget) I had written.