INVOKING REFLECTION, CONVERSATION & TRANSCENDENCE | AS FEATURED ON NPR, WITH ACCLAIMED PERFORMANCES AT JOE'S PUB (Public Theatre NYC), LITTLE ISLAND NYC, BARBES Brooklyn AND MORE. Live Sufi music for events & performances. Book Now!
Based in New York City, Falsa is rooted in 14th century Sufi music (Indian classical mysticism similar to Rumi's elevating poetry) with contemporary arrangements transcending genre-specificity and cultural preconceptions, in collaboration with a diverse array of improvisational world musicians.
A Falsa experience can range from Minimalist Meditative to Raga Jazz Fusion to high energy World Improvisation that gets you moving, to a more explosive Ritual-Communitas oriented one featuring dancers and immersive visuals. But ultimately, Falsa is about normalizing the transcendent experience.
It originally emerged as a collaboration between long-term friends and has since evolved into an exploration of what's possible when people are moved collectively by the pursuit of the intangible aspects of a communal gathering. There's a mystical culinary connection here: Falsa gets its name from a tropical berry native to India and Pakistan. And Sufi music is about a state of separation that longs for union. There was a decade in Umer's (vocalist, Falsa) life that he couldn’t return home to Pakistan from the US due to Kafkaesque immigration bureaucracies. When he finally returned and had the fruit again, it "broke through all the intellectualization and numbness I realized I had cultivated to cope, and in the process of giving myself over to the majesty of feeling I realized that home is something you cannot take with you, you have to return to it"
In our music, we want to revere and dignify the most magical aspects of experience that are gifts and not acquisitions, like reclaiming a half-remembered dream. Our music is not about means to ends, but about meaning and transcendence, about healing a wounded alienation we feel in our very highly mechanized, and in the ways that matter, poorly connected society, one performance at a time.
Falsa brought their transcendent blend of devotional sound and improvisation to the iconic Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space — and nearly sold out the house. In this unforgettable evening, the NYC-based collective fused the ecstatic poetry of 14th-century Sufi mystics with raga jazz, Carnatic violin, tabla, and minimalist meditative textures. The result: a spellbinding, genre-defying performance that left the audience moved and resonant.
