Oriental Music meets Europe

The story behind this project:
We started to play music together in 2015, when we met as part of a refugee project, when musicians from Vienna went to the new established camps to play music for and with refugees.

After exchanging a lot of music and our stories, Philip and Ahmed decided one year later to develop a professional music project out of this experiences.

Together with Antonia and Ali the actual ensemble took its shape:
Music from Middle East countries, exspecially Turkey and Iraq encounters a new Interpretation while played in Vienna by the musicians of four different countries. The music gets a new face with influences of Flamenco and Jazz.

Our name „Vienna-Ishtar Ensemble“ is a combination of Vienna, our common home city, and „Ishtar“, the old babylonian goddess of love, fertility and war.

We learned that the equivalent of the babylonian Ishtar is our „Easter“ the syncretistic festival of spring and joy.