“I’m coming back to a love affair, and applying this huge treasure trove of experience across different worlds. And it’s not like someone doing it in their twenties or thirties. There are no boundaries for me now. I’ve given up everything, and now focusing on something I should have been doing 40 years ago.”
Mustafa Khetty, composer, song writer, producer
Mustafa Khetty is an enigma. A world traveller, gold bullion trader and a techno entrepreneur, he migrated through rarefied realms of privilege in the Middle and Far East. But buried inside him was the Irish schoolboy who lived to make music during the high days of prog rock, until his Sri Lankan parents’ disapproval ripped those ambitions away. That dream began when in 1971, aged 11, Mustafa left tropical, humid Sri Lanka for “damp, soggy” beloved Ireland. This essentially migratory soul soon embraced his chilly new home. “We were all packed off to this strange little island,” he recalls of the cultural and climactic shock. “If it wasn’t for Irish humour, we would have all gone mad. But I became Irish, because the music, prose and poetry, classical and choral music and literature inspired me. Graduating from college in 1981, Mustafa soon found himself in New York, observing the ferocious behaviour dramatised in the movie Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street first-hand. “Because it’s an ecosystem where it’s possible to lose your humanity, spirit and principles. A place where one can be intellectual, and a savage.” Instead, his listening, like his life, ranged across the world: New Age, Jazz, Ethnic, South American, Korean, Japanese, North Indian, Himalayan, Tibetan, Romanian, Georgian and Iranian music. Now, 40 years later, Mustafa is a musician again, masterminding The Morpheus Project’s Mozaick, a classic prog album steeped in the genre’s virtuoso excess, and fuelled by a wildly different lifetime’s experience. “There are no boundaries for me now. I’ve given up everything, and focusing on what I should have been doing 40 years ago.” A bohemian, at times recluse, he remains a maverick. Mustafa lives between Sri Lanka, UAE (Dubai) and Turkey (Istanbul) where his studio is located (www.morpheusmusica.com), and visits Ireland regularly.