PE-KO Records

07/22/2026

Mohamad Hussein’s fourth release, Aghrab Ya Donia, was a bell dancers delight.

Listen to Aghrab Ya Donia by Mohamad Hussein on YouTube Music - a dedicated music app with official songs, music videos, remixes, covers, and more.

07/21/2026

07/10/2026

Paul Baghdadlian. The Beloved Armenian Singer Whose Voice Became the Soundtrack of the Armenian Diaspora. 🇦🇲
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73 years ago today, on July 10, 1953, the Aleppo-born singer whose voice would carry the longing of an entire diaspora was born. Paul Baghdadlian sang in Western Armenian, sang of love and exile and homeland, and became the voice every Armenian community from Beirut to Glendale to Paris turned on when they wanted to remember who they were. His songs are still played in every Armenian household. They are still sung at every Armenian wedding. The voice endures. The soundtrack carries on.

From Aleppo To The World
Paul Baghdadlian was born Krikor Baghdadlian in Aleppo, Syria, into a family of Armenian Genocide survivors who had built a new life in the great Armenian community of Aleppo. Struggling to make ends meet as a teenager, he began performing to support himself, and released his first album, “Antzrev E Kalis,” in 1976, on the eve of the Lebanese Civil War. In 1977, he moved to Los Angeles to launch an international career, and his family eventually settled in Pasadena, California.

Within a few years, his voice would travel with the Armenian diaspora as it scattered across the world, becoming a fixed point of cultural identity in every community it reached. He recorded more than 25 studio albums, 7 live albums, and dozens of collaborations across his career, performing in concert halls and community centers from Beirut to Damascus to Aleppo to Australia to Amsterdam to Los Angeles, and earned the affection of multiple generations of Armenians for whom his songs became the language of their longing.

Paul The Prince
Before he was Paul Baghdadlian, he was Paul the Prince. In the early 1970s in Beirut, the cultural capital of the Armenian Middle Eastern diaspora at the time, he performed entirely in English under that stage name. Then he heard the music of fellow Armenian diaspora singer Harout Pamboukjian, and made the decision that would define the rest of his life: he would sing in Armenian. The love songs that followed would become the foundation of his global success and the soundtrack of an entire diaspora.

The Voice Of Western Armenian
In a diaspora where Western Armenian is increasingly endangered, Baghdadlian sang almost exclusively in it. His lyrics carried the dialect of the Armenian Genocide survivors, the Armenians of Cilicia, the Armenians of Lebanon and Syria, and the Armenian quarters of Istanbul. He was, in effect, the last great popular musical voice of a language that UNESCO has now classified as endangered.

His songs spoke of the homeland in the present tense, even when his audience had never seen it. Love songs, exile songs, songs about Armenia as a place that existed in the body even when it could not be reached. For the diasporan Armenian, his music was not just entertainment. It was continuity.

A Soundtrack Of The Diaspora
There are songs every Armenian knows by heart without ever having been taught. "Mayrig Jan," his tribute to his mother, has become a cultural artifact, played at every diaspora gathering where mothers are honored. "Siretzi Yes Megin," "Sev Acher," "Sirem," "Naz Aghchig," and dozens of others carry the same weight.

His voice has played at engagements, weddings, baptisms, and funerals from Beirut to Buenos Aires to Boston for nearly five decades. It is impossible to grow up Armenian in the diaspora and not know him.

A Voice That Carries Forward
Paul Baghdadlian passed away on June 28, 2011, in Glendale, California, at the age of 57, after a long battle with lung cancer, just 12 days short of his 58th birthday. He died in the heart of the Armenian-American community he had called home for 34 years, and was survived by his wife, his children, and a global diaspora that had taken his songs as its own.

Today, on what would have been his 73rd birthday, his music is still pressed into every Armenian wedding playlist. Still played in every Armenian household kitchen. Still sung by Armenian grandmothers teaching their grandchildren the words of a homeland they have never seen.

The man was born 73 years ago today. The voice still carries.

07/03/2026

ON THIS DAY in 1950, Harout Pamboukjian, the Voice of the Armenian Nation, Was Born. 🇦🇲
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76 years ago today, on July 1, 1950, Harout Pamboukjian, the Armenian singer and multi-instrumentalist known across the Armenian world as Dzakh Harut, and the man who has served as the connective tissue of the global Armenian nation for more than five decades, was born.

His 28 concerts after the 1988 earthquake became a cultural moment for the Armenian nation.

From Yerevan to Erebouni
Harout Pamboukjian was born on July 1, 1950 in Yerevan's Nor Aresh neighborhood, the son of two Armenian Genocide survivors. His father, Yesayi Pamboukjian, was born in 1901 in Zeitun. His mother, Tsaghik Shahakyan, was born in 1907 in Tigranakert. After the Genocide, both families fled to Beirut, and in 1946 they made the journey to Soviet Armenia. Four years later, Harout was born in the homeland his parents had crossed a sea to reach.

His mother was a singer. She was his first influence. In his early teens, he took up the guitar, the bouzouki and the saz, the dhol, and the piano. He would play left-handed for the rest of his life, a habit that gave him his stage name: Dzakh Harut, "Left Harout."

He attended School No. 43 in Yerevan and enrolled at the Terlemezyan Art School, where he trained as a painter and sculptor. He graduated in 1968. He then served two years in the Soviet Army in Konotop, Ukraine.

In the late 1960s, he formed a band called Erebouni. They played weddings, universities, and village gatherings across Soviet Armenia. Their repertoire blended Charles Aznavour, Deep Purple, and Elvis Presley alongside centuries-old Armenian folk tunes. In an era when Soviet cultural policy imposed strict oversight on what could and could not be performed, Erebouni was a working example of an Armenian musical identity that quietly refused to be flattened.

The Exit
In 1975, under the political restrictions of the Soviet system, Harout Pamboukjian and most of his family left Soviet Armenia. He spent a year in Lebanon, the same country his parents had fled to after the Genocide two generations earlier. Then he crossed the Atlantic to Los Angeles, where the Armenian diaspora was gathering into what would become one of the largest and most concentrated Armenian communities in the world.

Where Were You, God?
Only two months after his arrival in Los Angeles, Pamboukjian went into the Quad Teck studio in Koreatown and recorded his first album. He called it "Our Eyir Astvats" — "Where Were You, God?"

The album, whose title track was written by Arthur Meschian, was about the Armenian Genocide. His parents had survived it. He had grown up on their stories.

His first act as an artist in America was to name the wound the world had told his people to forget.

The Wedding Singer
The first album made him a fixture in the Los Angeles Armenian community, and from there in the diaspora at large. He built his career at Armenian engagement parties, baptisms, fairs, and dinner dances, where he was expected to sing for five to six hours at a stretch.

Fathers-of-the-bride from as far away as France would pay thousands of dollars for an hour of his time. He earned the nickname "The Armenian Wedding Singer." He played the Rose Bowl, the Shrine, and the Palladium.

But it was in the banquet halls, at the community centers, and at the family celebrations that his voice found its truest audience. His voice became the sound of a global nation. He was the sound Armenians heard at their happiest moments and their most difficult ones.

The 28 Nights
In 1988, a catastrophic earthquake struck northern Armenia. More than 25,000 people were killed. More than 500,000 were left homeless.

One year later, hundreds of thousands of Armenians gathered at the Hrazdan Stadium and the Karen Demirchyan Complex in Yerevan to hear Harout Pamboukjian sing. He performed 28 concerts. It was a cultural moment of the modern Armenian nation: an entire people looking for something to hold onto and finding it in the voice of a man who had left them fourteen years earlier and come home to sing.

He has been coming home ever since.

The Anthems
The songs that carried Harout Pamboukjian across the Armenian diaspora were not his own compositions. They were the centuries-old folk tunes about protecting the soil and fighting in the highlands: "Antranik Pasha," "Sassouni Orore," "Msho Aghchig," "Msho Dashter," "Hey Jan Ghapama." He gave them the voice they had been waiting for.

His most beloved patriotic songs became the anthems the Armenian diaspora still sings together at rallies, at protests, and at community events across every corner of the world. He collaborated with Ruben Hakhverdyan, Arthur Meschian, Robert Amirkhanian, and Karnig Sarkissian. He has released more than 20 albums.

When Armenians organize for their causes — for Genocide recognition, for Syrian Armenian relief, for the victims of the Beirut port explosion, for the wounded of the Artsakh Wars, for the children being treated for cancer at the Yerevan Hematology Center — Harout Pamboukjian shows up. He sings for them. He always has.

A Nation's Voice
In 2015, the Republic of Armenia formally named him an Honored Artist of the Republic. The city of Los Angeles, where he had rebuilt his life, declared November 26 "Harout Pamboukjian Day."

The state gave him a title. The city gave him a day. The nation he had never stopped serving gave him something bigger: a place as a cultural institution in the memory of every household in the diaspora.

Today, on his 76th birthday, Dzakh Harut is still singing. The Armenian nation, wherever it is, still gathers around his voice.

Long may he sing.