“The story behind every music ensemble is always the music,” says Sina Fakhroddin. For Iranian-Kurdish composer and percussionist Fakhroddin, it’s also a place for pulling different strings—from the sitar, sarangi, the jazz guitar, and centuries-old folk melodies—into a common harmony.
Trained in Iranian classical music, Fakhroddin, also the founder of the city-based instrumental ensemble World Ethnic Music Ensemble (WEME), has a doctorate in Hindustani music. Though primarily a percussionist, Fakhroddin is also a sitarist and often composes on it. What began as a personal experiment composing melodies on his sitar became a collaborative project as he brought in fellow musician friends. “One composition became two, then three,” he recalls, and soon, the ensemble, formed in 2009, began to take shape with an unconventional lineup including the harp, cello, and mandolin. Now set to perform at Delhi’s OddBird Theatre on July 11, WEME’s five-piece ensemble weaves together the textures of both Western and traditional instruments like sitar and harp; its sound sits at the intersection of Persian and Indian musical traditions, drawing from ragas, scales, and centuries-old textures, all anchored in Fakhroddin’s original compositions.
Though rooted in classical forms, their tracks aren’t bound by strict frameworks. “They’re musical thoughts — inspirations from different places,” he says. At the upcoming performance, they’ll revisit older pieces like ‘Seeking You’ and ‘The Wanderer’ as well as ‘The Greek’ — a piece restructured from a traditional Greek melody — an homage to their folk music traditions.
For Fakhroddin, poetry is often a guiding force, particularly the spiritual verses of Rumi. ‘Seeking You,’ he says, draws from Rumi’s ‘A Great Wagon.’ “Who is he talking to?” he wonders. “Us? Or a higher being? We should look at it that way.”
His connection to poetry is cultural and ancestral. “People ask me — if you could be reborn, which country would you choose? I always say Iran. Just the fact that I can read Rumi or Hafez in the language they originally wrote in is enough for me.”
Music and politics
Fakhroddin, an Iranian by birth, has called Delhi his second home since 2003, when he moved to the city at the age of 15. Though his parents returned to Tehran four years later, he stayed back for college — and never quite left. Today, he lives in Delhi full-time, regularly travelling to Iran to visit his family. But with political tensions escalating in Central Asia and the recent Iran-Israel conflict hitting close to home, he admits, “things are difficult right now.”
His family and partner still live in Tehran. During the recent attack, when a missile landed near their building, they packed up and left. “That moment when you lock the door — you don’t really know if you’re coming back again.”
This dual belonging and the pain of watching both homelands suffer seeps into his music. For him, art is never neutral. “It’s not a commodity. It’s not for entertainment.” Fakhroddin draws a distinction between what’s ephemeral and what lasts. “If you look at Bollywood — it’s a hit for six months and then that song is gone. But if you listen to Kishore Kumar’s songs, they’re still alive. Because it had so much soul.”
That soul, he says, gives art its deeper purpose — to reflect joy, pain, injustice, and memory. “I don’t know how you can be an artist and not be political,” he says. “I become political especially when it's affecting me, my family, my country.” And when the world seems to burn, silence isn’t an option. “Wherever there is human suffering, one has to speak up,” he says. “Because if you don’t — when it happens to you — you’ll see that nobody cares.”
Keeping it alive
This upcoming performance reunites WEME’s original core lineup from 2017: Fakhroddin on percussion, Bombay-based French guitarist Loïc Sanlaville, Fateh Ali on sitar, Mohit Lal on tabla, and Subhan Ali on sarangi. It also marks the group’s first show after a five-year hiatus following the COVID-19 pandemic. “We were on a roll before it struck,” Fakhroddin says, recalling gigs across festivals like Pushkar Sacred Festival and Hampi Utsav.
Keeping WEME afloat hasn’t been easy. “Delhi is expensive. It’s not easy to make ends meet, especially for artists like us who don’t work in the commercial realm,” he says, adding that he has often questioned whether it should continue, especially with life changes, shifting lineups, and rotating instruments making continuity difficult. “You develop a relationship with the musicians — we're almost all friends — it’s very difficult to separate work from friendship. Sometimes I had to break hearts by asking someone to leave. That was very tough.”
As war casts shadows across parts of the world he calls home, it’s his music — and the friends who return to play it with him — that offer a sense of solace and resistance. “This concert is going to be about my friends coming to my rescue at a difficult time — when my country was under war,” he says. Music may not stop missiles, but it can hold space for grief, friendship, and hope and sometimes, that’s what keeps the light from going out.
World Ethnic Music Ensemble will perform at OddBird Theatre, Dhan Mill compound, today at 7.30 pm
This article is written by Adithi Reena Ajith