Biography

Farman Fathalian was born in 1970 in Tehran. When he was five years old, his parents encouraged him to learn the violin in a music institute. After the Islamic revolution, he played different musical instruments and gradually guitar became his specialty. In 1992, he performed his first guitar concert at the Centre for Mental Nurture of Children and Teenagers cinema in Tehran, which attracted much attention. Farman Fathalian is best known as a devotee of Ali-ibn-i-Abi-Talib, who is the first leader, after Islam's prophet, in Shiite and the fourth caliph in Sunni religions. In music, he intelligently mixes these religious aspects with elements of Indian instruments like tabla as well as acoustic/electric guitar, bass, and drums. After 1992, during several travels to India, he became familiar with Indian temples and the history of Indian theosophy and traditional Indian music. In his continued journeys to India, he also learned to play the Indian tabla from Usman Khan and companioned with many Qawwals. Indian Qawwali music has had a profound effect on his musical thought. In 1998, after six years, he performed a guitar recital in Golestan cultural house in Tehran, and in the same year, he won the brilliant performance award in the first Iranian popular music festival. He composes and arranges almost all of his songs and plays Spanish/acoustic guitar, tabla, keyboards, and percussion. Also he has recorded a few songs with lyrics by himself as well. Farman has recorded three albums up to now. 2000's Resident was a great attempt for a first album. He delayed the publishing of his second album for three years. In 2003's Way of Love, he used electronic instruments like drum loops for the first time. He also partly receded from sacred concepts and started to add some mundane sense to his music. This was not all his fans loved to see from Farman Fathalian, but no one complained about the musical part of his album. The third album was published in 2004 and entitled Drunken and Ruined, which can be considered the most ripened in his musical life. In Drunken and Ruined he continued playing different musical forms as well, but this time in a more rational way than his second album. For instance, the song "The Story of Najaf" has a jazz mood. ~ Pouya Partovi, Rovi