Backstage, Arthur closes his eyes. The crowd hums beyond the curtain, but he’s listening to something deeper, the voice that survived every no, every failure, every moment he almost quit. That voice is why he’s here. It’s the echo of his grandmother’s voice singing “Hashak Mer Hareem,” a Komitas song that has followed him since childhood like a faithful shadow. That voice is still there, intertwined into every note he sings.


Arthur Khachents Shaheni Arustamyan was born in Taghaser, in the Hadrut region of Artsakh, but his real education didn’t happen in classrooms. It happened at home, in the presence of music that felt less like entertainment and more like inheritance. His grandmother didn’t just sing songs to him she passed down something more essential: a way of understanding the world through melody, through the ache and beauty of Armenian folk tradition.

“I was in love with those songs since childhood,” he says, and you can hear the sincerity in it. Not nostalgia, exactly, but something more active , a love that demanded a response, that made him restless until he could respond to it properly.

So he did what people who are truly called to something do: he pursued it seriously. Music school, then conservatory. Years of disciplined study. But discipline alone doesn’t explain what drives a person to spend their life chasing something that can’t be held.


His first instrument was piano , practical, structured, the kind of thing that makes parents comfortable. But Arthur’s heart wasn’t in it. He was thinking about something else: a guitar, and mountains, and the kind of solitude where a person can finally listen to themselves.

“I dreamed of having my own guitar and playing alone in the mountains,” he says.

That image , a young man with a guitar, alone in the Armenian highlands , tells you something true about him. He’s not the kind of artist who needs spotlights to feel real. He needs authenticity. He needs the guitar he learned on his own, not because he was asked to, but because something inside him demanded it.

The artists who shaped his thinking , Sayat-Nova and Komitas understood this too. They didn’t create beautiful things because it was their job. They created beautiful things because it was the only honest way to live. Arthur studied their legacy with the devotion of someone who understood he was inheriting not just songs, but a responsibility.



Before Arthur Khachents was a composer, he was a poet. This matters, because you can hear it in how he talks about his own work. He doesn’t discuss his songs as products or accomplishments things to be proud of or defended. He talks about them as his children.

“As much as I give birth to them, they give me wings,” he says.

That kind of language , vulnerable, almost sacred , reveals something crucial. For him, creating music is not a career move or a way to gain recognition. It’s closer to prayer, or confession. When he creates, something moves through him that feels larger than himself.

“Creating is a divine pleasure,” he says simply.

His approach to songwriting is uncompromising. A song must come from somewhere real. The lyrics and music can’t be manufactured or clever , they have to *feel* true, because they *are* true. He’s written songs at different stages of his life, and he carries them all with him. “My death will not change anything in life” arrived early, a reflection of younger Arthur wrestling with meaning. Later came “Let’s fight for Artsakh,” written from a different kind of urgency entirely.

Both songs matter to him equally, not because they’re equally successful or popular, but because they both came from somewhere honest.



There’s something Arthur knows about live performance that studio recording can never fully replicate: the moment when art becomes conversation. When he’s on stage, he can see the response in people’s faces. The exchange is immediate, real, not mediated by screen or distance.

“Live performances are another, fresh world,” he says. “You can see the reactions of the listeners to my songs on the spot.”

He’s performed in open-air concerts across Artsakh in Tigranakert, Martuni, Chartar, Martakert, Stepanakert and those moments have carved themselves into his memory. There’s an electricity to singing under open sky, with nothing between the artist and the listener but air and sound and the mutual understanding that something true is happening.

When he sings, he’s not performing *at* people. He’s singing *from* them or more precisely, he’s singing what he believes is already living in their hearts.

“I simply try to sing from people’s hearts,” he says.



But this interview is also about something else entirely. It’s about a pain that no amount of music can fully resolve, though music is all Arthur has found that helps bear it.

The fall of Artsakh has left a wound in him that he doesn’t pretend is healing. It’s not the kind of loss you move on from or process into wisdom. It’s a raw, ongoing ache — the loss of the place that made him who he is, that gave his music its source and its meaning.

“The loss of Artsakh is a great blow and pain for me,” he says quietly. “A wound that cannot be irreversible.”

Note the language: “cannot be irreversible.” It’s an odd phrase, almost contradictory, unless you understand what he means , that this wound will not become irrelevant, will not fade into the background. It will remain part of him, a permanent alteration of who he is.

The concerts he gave in Artsakh, those open-air performances where he could see the faces of his listeners, feel like they belong to another lifetime now. When he speaks of missing them, he’s not just speaking of performance opportunities. He’s speaking of losing the ground beneath his feet.

“I will miss my last performances the most,” he says.

There’s a strange kind of honesty in that statement — the acceptance that what he had might be all he’ll ever have of that particular, irreplaceable thing.


Even in the aftermath of loss, Arthur continues to compose. He’s working on new songs now, ones that feel as necessary to him as the basic elements of survival.

“There are songs that are as necessary as conscience, bread and water, air,” he says.

He speaks of them carefully, almost protectively, because they’re not ready to be shared yet. They need more time. They need more truth. This is the work of someone who hasn’t given up, who hasn’t decided that loss means an end to creation.

If anything, the opposite has happened. The urgency has only deepened.



When Arthur gives advice to young people considering a life in music or any art form, he’s direct and unromantic. He doesn’t tell them it will be easy or that success will come quickly. He tells them something more important:

“Don’t waste your effort and energy from the field of motivation. Work to achieve professional growth and eternity in your lives.”

What he’s really saying is this: if you feel called to something, take it seriously enough to truly commit. Don’t let the difficulty or the uncertainty or the lack of immediate reward convince you that it doesn’t matter. Because in the end, the work you do from a place of genuine calling that’s the work that lasts. That’s the work that becomes part of people’s hearts.

That’s what Arthur Khachents has learned. And that’s what he keeps trying to do to sing from the hearts of his people, to create from necessity, to make something true in a world that has taught him the meaning of loss.

We’re at Armvault wising you nothing but more success in your music. Not because success is guaranteed, not because the path ahead is smooth. We’re rooting for you because we know what it costs to stand where you’re standing. We know the nights you questioned everything. The moments your hands shook. The people who doubted. And still, you showed up. Still, you kept going. That takes something most people don’t have. So take that stage and make it yours. Not for us. For the version of yourself that almost gave up but didn’t. You’ve already won the hardest battle and now the world knows.