Arieb Azhar

About me:

I have been fascinated with music for as long as I can remember. I grew up listening to Eastern and Western classical and folk music. In my teens I picked up the basics of the guitar, and since then I have used the guitar as an accompanying instrument. At the age of nineteen I went to Croatia (then Yugoslavia) for my studies and spent the subsequent 13 years of my life in Zagreb. It was there that I was exposed to the folk music of the Balkan regions as well as to Celtic Irish music through musician friends. We recorded a couple of albums with my band in Zagreb and played concerts and gigs of mostly Irish and Balkan music around Croatia, Austria and Germany. In 2003 I shifted back to Pakistan with the aim of immersing myself in the music of the Sub-continent, and the hope of finding my soul in music. Two years ago I recorded my first album in Karachi, which is based around the Mystic poetry of the Sufis of Punjab. The last track on the album is a “Sevdah” song from Bosnia, which for me represents the cultural parallel to the Sufi Kalaams of Pakistan. Two more albums should be out by this autumn. I am not involved in the preservation of certain Art forms. In my music I try to express the human soul (in it's journey to the Self), according to the best of my ability while making use of all relevant influences that I have absorbed along the way.