BBC Radio 2 ‘Musician of the Year’ Mohsen Amini from Glasgow, Scotland is an incredibly fast growing name in the traditional world. Boasted by the Herald as a “Virtuoso” and the BBC Scotland as a “Force of Nature” he’s a leading voice on the music scene today.
In 2014 he co-founded multi-award winning trio, Talisk, who after only a few months of formation won a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award. Their debut album Abyss was shortlisted at the 2016 MG Alba Trad Awards as Album of the Year, the same awards where they were crowned Folk Band Of The Year in 2017. Their second studio album “Beyond” was released in 2018 and picked up multiple 5* reviews and was named a top of the world album by Songlines. Shortly after the band won the Belhaven Bursary Award with a cash prize of £25,000 matched only by the Mercury Award.
Mohsen also founded acclaimed supergroup Ímar at the start of 2016. They, in the space of two years managed to go viral with videos excessing 1 million views. This provided a great platform to launch their award nominated album Afterlight and even managed to have them nominated as “Live Act of the Year” which was shortly followed by them being awarded the 2018 Horizon Award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. 2018 brought out Avalanche which went straight to Number 1 on the iTunes world music chart and gained nationwide media praise.
Alongside launching Ímar in 2016, Mohsen was crowned the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year. With this in hand he’s performed in all around the world and appeared regularly on a variety of BBC shows such as, Radio Scotland, Radio 2, Music day with Bryan Burnett and BBC Alba. Mohsen has toured with some of the top names in the scene, been named in the Daily Record ‘Young Scot of the Year’, named in The List’s Hot 100, became the first ever musician to be nominated as ‘Instrumentalist of the Year’ at the 2016 MG Alba Trad Awards, ‘Musician of the Year’ at the 2017 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards and win the 2016 ‘Young Traditional Musician of the Year’ and to boot, he’s now joined ranks with some of the biggest names today being the youngest ever person to be crowned ‘Musician of the Year’ at the 2018 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.
He recently announced:
This is very rogue and absolutely out of character but I am releasing my first ever solo single. I always put every second of my life into Talisk & Imar, but 4 years ago where I had a all the time in the world I decided to just go at it and see how it would go! Yeah that’s right, it’s taken me 4 years to get round to this… I didn’t want to do a big PR and shout for weeks about it, I just wanted to get it out and give something to the scene that’s a bit different!To be honest it was a bit of an experiment in learning to record and video edit which I did about 4 years ago and have been sitting back waiting to put it out for years and it was about time to put it out. Incredible proud of this video so hope you all enjoy it! Here is 3 of me doing what I absolutely love!!
