Middle Eastern Frequencies

Oli Warwick presents a snapshot of experimental music across the Middle East and North Africa at a time when regional instability and injustice casts a long shadow.

Preface

In November 2023 I was commissioned to write a feature looking at experimental music from the Middle East for Songlines magazine. At the best of times it can be risky trying to cover such a broad and diverse region in one 2,000 word feature, but in the wake of October 7 through an ongoing crisis it felt questionable whether now was the time to be chatting about music. On reflection, I decided it was a valuable opportunity to hear from artists in the region, to listen to their perspective and reflect on the context they create in. It’s not a piece about Gaza, and it doesn’t pretend to wrestle with the nuance of post-colonial fallout in a region which has been manipulated so heinously by Western regimes. But of course, these elements can’t help but hang in the background. 

The piece I wrote ended up much longer than the commissioned brief — you can read the Songlines feature here — and so I present it here in full. It’s still just a small snapshot of scenes – far from exhaustive – but hopefully it tells a slightly more detailed story of some of the incredible, visionary music from across the MENA region. 

It’s heartbreaking to contemplate the atrocities still being inflicted on the people of Palestine by the Israeli occupying forces and their morally bankrupt government. If you can find any way to donate funds or continue to speak up for people being robbed of their voices, please do. Our previously published article has some useful links to compilations, events and more. 

Intro

“It’s not a very inspiring and comfortable situation now,” says Sharif Sehanoui, taking a drag on his cigarette on the balcony of his Beirut apartment. “It’s not normal at all. In some way it’s even more traumatic than everything else combined. We’re not under fire ourselves, but I can tell you the feeling of everybody is complete and utter disgust. It pulls you down.” 

It’s January 2024 when I speak to Sehanoui, more than three months after Hamas’ October 7 massacre triggered a spiral of violence centred around Israel’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza. With continued exchange of fire across the border between Lebanon and Israel amidst a swirl of regional instability in the Middle East, the mood in Beirut is ominous. 

When Sehnaoui refers to “everything else combined,” he’s talking about Lebanon’s own tumultuous recent history, from the destructive civil war between 1975 and 1990, the economic crisis since 2019 and the 2020 Beirut port explosion to the fuel crisis of 2021. The Mediterranean country is more widely recognised for its crises than its culture, but in the midst of chaos Beirut’s experimental music scene is unfathomably rich and active. Sehnaoui has a significant part to play in that, having since the 90s helped nurture a scene built up on noise rock and free improv in lieu of other more mainstream influences. One of the major ways he’s achieved this is through organising Irtijal, a widely respected experimental music festival he and Mazen Kerbaj founded in 2000. Despite the increasing instability across the Middle East and North African (MENA) region, plans for the 2024 edition are proceeding.  [editor’s note – Irtijal 2024 has since gone ahead, by all accounts a successful weekend of music.]

“We’re planning Irtijal,” he says. “We’re taking the least possible risks in terms of people travelling in because we have the distinct possibility that we’ll need to cancel and re-book. We need to warn all foreign guests that hey, this is the situation here. We are proceeding as if we’re going to be able to do that that event, and we’ll see what comes.”

Beirut

Sehanoui fed into the Beirut scene through his own musical endeavours in projects like “A” Trio, and digging into his tangle of projects and collaborations inevitably leads to critical labels Ruptured and Al-Maslakh, and the Tunefork Studio run by musician, producer and engineer Fadi Tabbal. It’s immediately apparent how mature, varied and assured the music scene in Beirut is, spanning avant-garde electronics and leftfield beats through to drone, noise and free improvisation. In the post-war 90s, a new youth movement actively embraced non-Arabic music from rock to hip-hop. Bands like alt-rockers Scrambled Eggs and trip-hoppers Soap Kills set the tone for Lebanon to have its own spin on non-mainstream music, and Ziad Nawfal’s Ruptured Sessions on Radio Lebanon played a pivotal role in broadcasting the rapidly developing community of artists to the rapidly developing audience.

“Not to pat ourselves on the back or anything, but just to say we’ve been really going hard since 2010,” explains Nawfal. 

“There is no specificity to the Beirut scene in sound at all,” Sehanoui points out, “and I think that is the specificity. Lebanon is a mishmash of cultures, languages and identities, all coexisting. The particularity of the Lebanese music scene is the ability for it to be diverse.”

“As well as the experimental scene, there’s a totally different music scene in Beirut that is extremely Arabic focused,” explains Mayssa Jallad’s whose own Ruptured release Marjaa: The Battle of The Hotels blends ambient synth, oud and percussion with Arabic lyrics exploring a lingering legacy of the Lebanese civil war. “Finally, these two scenes are melting into each other in Beirut, and it’s creating incredible new experimental bands like SANAM.”

In a community where micro scenes of jazz, traditional Arabic (or oriental, as the locals refer to it), rock and electronics intertwine, you end up with projects like SANAM, a standout success of 2023 on an international level. The project features key players from different pockets of Lebanon’s music scene, and their Aykathani Malakon album is a towering example of the power and beauty in the country’s homegrown music culture. 

But Lebanon is not an island, and across the Arab world inspiring experimental music scenes are incubating in various states and sizes, with breakthrough artists earning global recognition and in some cases diffusing the lazy stereotypes which so often come with Western responses to non-Western art. Just as cultures intertwine within Lebanon, so too certain connections band together the experimental scenes in this part of the world, whether through collaboration or simply an abstract aesthetic attitude. The differences are profound and the similarities heartening, as artists attempt to overcome challenges posed by authoritarian, corrupt or absent governments and the lingering legacy of colonialism to express themselves and forge connections at home and abroad. 

Cairo

Cairo, and Egypt more broadly, has captivated the region with music harking back to the prolific 60s period and superstar singers like Oum Kalthoum, Abdel Halim Hafez and Mohammed Abdel Wahab. In more recent years, the city has been a hotbed of high-impact, wildly inventive electronic producers like ZULI, 3Phaz and Dijit, spring-boarded to wider consciousness by the role of VENT as a leading venue in the city during a brief patch of optimism for experimental music in the capital. Around the same time circa 2013, 3Phaz also helped establish a studio called Epic 101 which was a pivotal gateway into production for many. 

“I took a crash course in Ableton Live at Epic 101 Studios,” explains Cairo-born singer, producer and dedicated experimenter Aya Metwalli. “The nice thing was it was not your typical DJ-going-to-learn-production kind of course. They see what you have, and they push that. So they showed me what I can experiment with in terms of effects and vocal processing.”

Metwalli embodies the vibrancy and connectivity of experimental music in the Levant through her work, first widely available on the BEITAK [EP] in 2016 and more recently through her collaboration with Sehanoui’s noise rock experimenters Calamita. The latter project happened after Metwalli had moved to Beirut and met Sehanoui working on a theatre production. 

“There are a few people in Cairo who started [the experimental music scene] a long, long time ago,” Metwalli explains, “but there are very little venues and it’s not something you’re exposed to a lot. Experimental music doesn’t have a place.”

3Phaz points to the era between 2012 and 2015 as a particularly strong time for experimental music in Cairo, when Mahmoud Rifat organised the 100Live festival alongside the 100Copies label to platform local electronic artists working outside more conventional dance music. It took place not long after the Egyptian revolution of 2011, when Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign as president in the face of nationwide protests.

“When I look back at my life, pre and post-revolution, there’s a big shift,” 3Phaz points out. “I became more aware that I am more in control of what I want to do with my life. After the revolution is when I left my old job and started the Epic 101 studio. It was never discussed, but I think the general feeling was rebelling against your current status quo and trying to move towards something else.”

Ultimately, the sense of hope brought about by the shifts of the Egyptian revolution didn’t amount to the social changes people were calling out for, and 3Phaz and Metwalli alike describe a sense of de-motivation amongst their generation after a certain amount of time had passed. 3Phaz moved away for a time, and on his return to Cairo he focused on developing his own musical practice which now ranks him among the most interesting producers working in leftfield club music in the city. His music initially took cues from Egypt-specific electro styles like maghranat and chaabi, captured on the 2020 LP Three Phase on 100Copies. But since then, 3Phaz has been conscious to move into less geographically-defined zones of sonic exploration. 

“I got a bit scared because I felt like I’ve been pigeon-holed into this maghranat-referencing musician,” he explains. “I continue to reference it with my most recent album Ends Meet, but in a much more indirect way. I don’t want this to be my identity. You don’t see someone from Germany, for example, being labelled as making ‘German electronic music’, but if you’re from from Egypt or from somewhere else, there’s this sense of having to exoticise this person and attaching the region to what they’re doing.”

3Phaz’s ever-evolving style strikes a unique tone in the amorphous club music sphere, not particularly tied to established Western sounds like techno or drum & bass and not laden with the signifiers of Egyptian or even Arabic music as a whole. The rhythms speak to ideas beyond typical Western tropes, and the percussion-focused production favours impactful drum hits laden with noise and harmonic overtones, but they avoid being anchored in a specific time and place. Many artists talk about the noise and intensity of Cairo, though, and 3Phaz equally admits his surroundings can’t help but have their part to play. 

“The environment has to have some kind of effect on the artist, right?” he admits. “Whether it’s a conscious effect, I don’t know. I don’t think I choose to make music that’s noisy because I live in a noisy environment, but maybe my ear is drawn to more noisy stuff, because this is something I relate to.”

Tunisia

In a similar way, Lyon-based, Tunisia-rooted label Shouka is steeped in this sense of modernist club music with a penchant for noise. It was founded by Amine Mettani as an outlet for the intense productions he and his friends were making, and one listen to his Divīne LP brings to light his embrace of abrasive, industrial intensity alongside electro, techno and trance. What’s different with Mettani’s work under his own name and at the helm of the Arabstazy collective, is a more explicit nod to Tunisian culture through particular vocal and instrumental samples. Standout Shouka artist Amine Nouri, aka Nuri, channels his own background in drumming into dynamic percussive workouts that omnivorously draw on a brand sweep of dance music styles. In the context of Shouka’s output, his debut album Drup sounds distinctly non-Western, which to the untrained ear might well default to being a direct channelling of Tunisian music culture, but Nouri is just as keen to escape the limitations of where he comes from. 

“Since moving to Denmark I still maintain connections with Tunisian artists and also collaborate with them,” Nouri says. “However, for my music style, I don’t limit myself only to the MENA region but to the worldwide audience, because I don’t identify myself with one specific culture. I am more open-minded. There are similarities in the use and construction of percussions and samples, as seen in artists like 3Phaz, Guedra Guedra from Morocco or Clap! Clap! from Italy. I’m mostly a sampler rather than an electronic producer, for example combining samples of chants from Vietnam with percussion from Mali and guitar from Texas.”

Another unique perspective on Tunisian club music comes from Azu Tiwaline, who grew up in France and on the Ivory Coast before her Tunisian mother moved back to Tunis, and eventually to the desert in the South West. Tiwaline now lives in her family home near Tozeur, creating a mesmerising, transcendental dance music which has found a home on European labels like I.O.T. and Livity Sound. She’s removed from the scene in Tunis, connecting with a more global community of artists and collaborators, folding in the influence of her background into the fabric of a sound that’s hard to pin down. 

“I’ve tried to absorb and analyse the different rhythms structure [in Tunisian and West African music,” says Tiwaline. “That’s the influence I’ve taken on – not at all with the melodies for example. You will never hear oriental melody in my tracks. I’m not sure Tunisian people could instantly find the Tunisian influence inside my music. It’s more subtle — I’m not making some traditional music.”

That said, Tiwaline did help curate a compilation highlighting the current wave of electronic music producers in Tunisia alongside scene stalwart Zied Meddeb Hamrouni, aka Shinigami San. Place: Tunisia spans purely beatless ambient as much as downtempo and upbeat dance music, offering a valuable insight into artists otherwise difficult to discover online. There still remains an emphasis on dancefloor tracks with a certain universal appeal, riding on mixable 4/4 pulses no matter how much percussion is clattering along on top. The Arabstazy compilation Under Frustration (Volume 1) equally offers an authoritative insight into the Shouka universe, at the same time taking a defiant stance against lazy categorisation and examining what it means to make music in the Arab world.

“This musical journey stands for the diversity of this scene,” the compilation’s liner notes explain, “and deconstructs the occidental perceptions that sees the Arab World as a culturally united and homogeneous entity. It is a manifesto for a burgeoning movement that is aware of its representations, immersing its roots into the future, while highlighting and transmuting its traditions.”

Amman

Omnipresent, conventional Western house and techno feature heavily as comparative scenes in many MENA cities, but the artists, label managers and promoters seeking something more unique are often trying to build their experimental music communities from nothing. That seems to be especially true of the Jordanian capital, Amman. Abdallah Taher, aka Shusmo, is a central figure in the city’s musical development, and he talks with fondness about the vibrant late 90s metal scene in Jordan when he was growing up. It was a scene that came with risks in the heavy-handed response from the authorities, who framed the music as a satan-worshipping scourge and slapped jail time on gig organisers, but it was fiercely original and rooted in resistance. 

Compared to the vibrant, deep-rooted music community in Beirut or Cairo’s legacy of artistry, Amman has struggled to engender the sense of community necessary to cultivate a tangible scene. 

“When you go to Lebanon and you meet Lebanese people, you find out they love their country, they love their communities, they love their city, they love their scenes and what they’re a part of,” says Taher. “Egyptians love Egypt, Palestinians love Palestine, and I’m not saying people don’t like Jordan, but Jordan is just such a weird place because of its history, because of the politics, because of its socio-economic history as well. And all of this plays into this massive disconnect that we feel when we’re trying to set something up or create a community.”

Having tired of attending tepid nightclubs that lacked musical substance, Taher and his friends started an event called TBA which helped foster a community of social misfits in the grand tradition of underground club nights. They kept the music policy approachable, drawing on funk, disco and hip-hop with a critical ear, but it was a marked departure from the disposable sounds on offer elsewhere. Still, it was with the opening of MNFA in 2022 that things seemed to take a positive turn in the city. Situated two storeys deep into the ground in an unused car park, the community-minded space offered a nexus to an emergent wave of non-conformist artists in Amman such as Big Murk, Toumba and 1800s Internet. 

“Amer Manaseer and Abdallah Dabbas took it upon themselves to open a venue that not only they would like, but would involve as many people from the community as possible,” Taher explains. “They were doing a great job, but then they shut down for two months because they were kind of burnt out, and then the whole October 7 thing happened. Till this day, they haven’t really found the headspace to reopen and do the nights, because people are not in the mood to go out and party. It feels kind of insensitive. And no one’s in the headspace to show up and play clubby stuff and pretend like nothing is happening 150 kilometres away from us.”

At the other end of the Amman underground sits Drowned By Locals, a proudly contrarian label run by Laith Demashqieh, Shereen Amarin, Firas Shahrour and Omar Amarin. They started with the Assembli event series (with Nidal Taha, Nick Newsom, Hamada Shahrour and Khalil Kamal) in 2018 which moved through Amman presenting some of the most uncompromising line-ups ever attempted in Jordan. In a regional show of strength, they invited Cairo’s Hizz label for a showcase, platforming experimental electronic artists like Youssef Abouzeid, Onsy and Elvin Brandhi.  

Speaking to Demashqieh and Amarin, they frame their mission with Drowned By Locals with the example of the su’luk, an early Arabian social figure forced out of their tribe who lived on the fringes of society, often becoming a renowned poet. 

“We created Drowned By Locals in a way to escape Jordan,” says Amarin, “to create our own little place inside of Jordan.”

Demashqieh admits the initial run of shows were, “embracing Jordan and giving them something that only a fool would give,” but the arrival of COVID in 2020 put an abrupt end to the events and Drowned By Locals evolved into a label that explicitly rejected statehood in favour of a meaningful connection with kindred wayward spirits in the virtual realm. Amongst the link ups with outsider artists in the UK, Italy and Indonesia, Demashqieh also nurtures his own absurd, sonically compelling mutations of Arabic culture under names like Al-Mutreb Abul-Loul and Abdel Ja7eem Hafeth. 

“I have side projects where I call myself blasphemous things,” he explains. “It’s dangerous, and the only hope for us is that Jordanians don’t know much about us.”

An imminent Drowned By Locals project doubles down on their cultural connections with a Jordanian/Palestinian hip-hop album from DJ Gawad, a memphis gangster rap parody featuring Palestinian MCs Tony Bleng, Fara7, rknddn, Julmud, MrF13, Twinkie, and Jurum. Meanwhile the label also recently released Saint Abdullah & Eomac’s searing Light meteors crashing around you will not confuse you – an industrial strength beat tape carved out in response to the upheaval since October 7.

Ramallah

Taher, who is also Palestinian, has nurtured a working relationship with Palestine and in particular the scene in Ramallah through his role assisting in the success of the 2019 Exist festival. The project emerged through driving force Odai Al-Masri, aka Oddz, who passed away in 2022. Having forged connections with the scene in Jordan, he started inviting regional and international artists to play in Ramallah, including Jordanian DJs like Taher (under his Shusmo alias).

“I got my first gig in Ramallah in 2010,” says Taher. “It was such a weird mixture of people because you had very interested people who wanted to come and check out new music. But then you also had people show up with like high heels and the shirt and all that. But the amazing thing about Ramallah is that people were all about it. There was no sense of entitlement. People ate it up.” 

Al-Masri was particularly proactive in developing a foundation of parties in Ramallah responding to bookings Demashqieh and Nidal Taha had made in Amman leading up to Exist Festival in 2019. A frankly staggering line-up including artists like Drew McDowall and Hiro Kone made the crossing from Jordan to the West Bank to perform for the historic event. 

“Although it was it was absolutely riddled with problems, not just organisationally speaking,” says Taher, “through all of that we managed to make it happen. To see something like that happening in Palestine, and artists coming from abroad and experiencing the crowd and experiencing the culture, is more gratifying than anything that we could have done. If you want to talk about community, and the feeling of working together through like a collaborative effort, whether it was intentional or not, it was extremely present.”

Looking into the Ramallah scene inevitably leads back to one artist in particular, Muqata’a. Since starting out with trailblazing hip-hop trio Ramallah Underground in the 00s, he’s gone on to become a leading light as a solo artist. His beats are focused on wildly original variations on the hip-hop template, charged with the cultural context through archival sampling of Palestinian music, field recordings from border checkpoints and more besides. Alongside the synthetic squiggles and lop-sided drums prevalent in his work, Muqata’a also displays a hearty embrace of noise. 

As he told me when we spoke back in 2021, “What’s really nice about the scene in Palestine is that there’s a lot of heavy support coming from the different smaller scenes, like the people that would go to a noise concert would be the same people that would come to a hip-hop concert, or some DJ set by someone else. So it’s very diverse but also united, and that makes it very interesting.”

Hip-hop is an enduring bedrock for music in Palestine, as demonstrated by crews like BLTNM featuring artists such as Al Nather and Shabideed, delivering a distinctly slanted twist on the trap formula. But the open-hearted embrace of noise aligns with a broader trend across the region. You can hear it in the churning, grinding overtones coming from Tunefork Studios in Beirut, and crackling on the surface of pristine productions from Cairo and Tunis. It’s especially audible in Tehran, where a community of experimental producers have frequently used noise as a medium. It’s another community which has struggled to exist in a more than hostile environment. 

Tehran

In 2017, I spoke to Ata Ebtekar one of the most prominent artists in the scene in Tehran, better known as Sote. It was a time of optimism, when tentative steps towards a scene in the city were taking place in galleries and black box theatre spaces. It was quite purely committed to experimental, challenging sonics which, in an echo of Ramallah, met with an open-minded response from a mixed crowd. Unfortunately, since then the picture shifted dramatically. After Donald Trump tore up the US-Iran nuclear deal in 2018, the economy crashed and the more conservative, right-wing factions in the government steered the country away from a seeming openness to the world towards cultural and political isolation.

This was of course devastating for the experimental music community, with the chance to organise events or perform all but extinguished. In 2017, accomplished producer and composer Siavash Amini was working alongside Ebtekar and a dedicated music community organising the SET Festival in Tehran.

“In 2017, it was the second year of SET,” he tells me via a VPN connection in Tehran. “We had a very moderate, right-wing government that was for diplomacy and not war, and there was not too much censorship inside Iran. We were hopeful. We were getting bigger, getting international acts and stuff. Unfortunately, that part of Iranian culture is in decline, partly because the business went bad and partly because of the very, very strict censorship in the past two or three years.”

For an artist like Amini, it’s critical to have a presence outside of Iran to make a life in music sustainable. Since being picked up by Mexico City label Umor Rex for his Till Human Voices Wake Us album in 2014, he’s been widely recognised as a leading light in Iranian electronic music. His approach varies greatly from release to release, but it’s steeped in an academic approach to the history of classical music in the region and a natural inclination towards noise and drone which tracks with the wider affinity for sonic abrasion across the Middle East. 

Amini has his own projects which continue apace, collaborating with lauded poet Eugene Thacker and mapping a chronological evolution of Persian tuning scales with deep, ancient-historical research. Meanwhile Ebtekar is still in Tehran and recording prolifically as Sote, releasing a fiercely pointed LP called Ministry Of Tall Tales on leading Shanghai-based label SVBKVLT, following on from 2022’s Majestic Noise Made In Beautiful Rotten Iran. Both Ebtekar and Amini’s volatile, impassioned sound responds to the situation in profound artistry, feeling truly representative of Tehran life without a shred of obvious orientalism for the Western ear. 

But Amini also acknowledges there is a younger generation creating a different sort of underground in Tehran centred around very intimate, jazz-oriented jam sessions. When he talks about the darker, more intense experimental electronic music community he was engaged with, Amini laments the loss of what they were developing, but he also points to the fact a lot of people left the country. 

“I’m very sad about the situation here,” he admits. “It’s incredibly depressing. But I think anyone who can escape the situation, I understand when they do.”

Maryam Sirvan is one such person, who along with her partner Milad Bagheri, formed NUM as a trip-hop project in 2010 in Northern Iranian town Rasht before heading into increasingly experimental sonic realms. It’s forbidden for women to sing in public in Iran amongst other restrictions, so for Sirvan staying was not an option. 

“Before leaving Iran in 2017 we had the opportunity to perform a few shows in Tehran and connect with the electronic music community there,” Sirvan explains. “We met Sote, Siavash Amini, Hesam Ohadi, and many more. Having shows in Tehran felt good but never was enough due to all the limitations and restrictions. For instance, if you organise a show in Iran, you always expect some sort of cancellation from the authorities, especially if any female artist is involved.”

Sirvan and Bagheri departed for Tbilisi in Georgia before more recently relocating to Calgary in Canada. Along the way they’ve studied and performed amidst the hustle of day jobs and the admin associated with emigration, and Sirvan in particular has shaped out a stunning solo artistic identity with her 2021 album Feast On My Body. It’s a fierce, unnerving work which hinges on distorted vocals and impressionistic noise. 

“My life is woven with anger and anxiety, which is obviously caused mostly by the situation I have been facing in Iran for most of my life,” Sirvan explains in no uncertain terms. “I have been trying to translate those feelings into sound — structured and layered noise has been one of the main tools for me to achieve this goal. I try not to let the chaos in, but to interpret it into sound instead.”

Surroundings and situations 

If Sirvan, Amini and Ebtekar create music which seems to uncontrollably writhe with sonic distress in response to their experiences and environment, there’s also space for more reflective reactions to tumultuous history. Mayssa Jallad’s Marjaa: The Battle Of The Hotels was borne from the Beirut scene around Ruptured and Tunefork Studio. The Lebanese singer and architect developed her project with Fadi Tabbal over a number of years, wishing to explore a chapter in the Lebanese civil war in which the rival armies exchanged fire between high-rises in Beirut’s hotel district. 

“I’m interested in history that people don’t want to talk about,” Jallad explains on a call from her family home in Beirut. “Histories that that are not documented, that are contested, that still are too sensitive to discuss. And the problem with something like the Lebanese civil war, for example, is that it’s not in our history books, because the way the civil war ended is the militias were transformed into political parties.”

Without taking a partisan stance, Jallad sonically maps ancient streets of Beirut and the unintended hotel fortresses with her own voice as well as collaborators like Julia Sabra and Pascal Semerdijan, Beirut scene luminaries who also form Jallad’s live band. It’s a delicate end result, but charged with a context which has helped it catch on with Western audiences, particularly when she performed in Oslo and the Netherlands. Fadi Tabbal preaches caution in this regard though, pointing out the shortcomings of the Western response to Jallad’s album in the wider context of music from the MENA region.

“Mayssa’s album is a thorough, complex and beautiful work of art,” says Tabbal, “but I feel the positive reaction is more because she’s talking about the Civil War, and she’s singing in Arabic than actually listening to the construction or the way the album’s done or the actual wording of what she’s saying. A big part of the problem with a lot of Europeans is they have a checkbox of what they expect a Lebanese artist to be.

“Sometimes when local artists want to connect with an external crowd, they start compromising their art form to check those lists,” he adds. “Of course, you hit the jackpot, like Mayssa, which is something personal. I don’t think we’re at the point where everything we can present can be received in the same generosity.” 

As the horrific situation unfolds in the occupied Palestinian territories, it casts a shadow over the creative impetus of people in the region. Taher likens the current mood in Amman to COVID lockdown minus the curfew, while 3Phaz laments the helplessness of being so close to what is happening in Gaza without being able to do anything beyond raising awareness.

“There will maybe come a time where we will use this as a positive creative energy,” says Sehanoui. “but that time is not here yet. Now, it’s a time of deep depression for absolutely everybody, in the art and music scene at least.”

Jallad has recently returned to Europe to perform more shows based around Marjaa – The Battle Of The Hotels, and she used the opportunity to educate and inform audiences with explanations of the themes she is singing about. I caught her first UK show – an intimate set at Folklore in Hoxton, East London. In the current climate, the weight of understanding is palpable in the audience as they listen to Jallad’s heartfelt narration in between her powerful songs (backed up by Lebanese indie royalty Julia Sabra on guitar and Pascal Semerdijan on drums).

“We made it a point to end each set with a song I wrote with my previous band about Gaza in 2014,” she says. “We brought it back, because we really believe this episode is not divorced from history. It’s all connected. I can tell you a bunch of ways the battle of the hotels itself is connected to the emergence of the State of Israel and the refugee crisis in Lebanon.”

Meanwhile, she’s also immersing herself in research to prepare for her next album. While the themes are still forming, Jallad’s aim is to write an academic paper to accompany the release. She shares her current reading material, which includes Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Emile Habibi’s satirical Arabic fiction The Secret Life Of Saeed: The Pessoptimist and Houria Bouteldja’s Whites, Jews and Us: Towards a Politics of Revolutionary Love. 

But while artists in the wider Middle East respond in their own ways to the violence and unrest, the war on Gaza continues unabated, and Palestinian artists are amongst all the other innocent people subjected to bombardment, displacement and starvation. In January 2024 Arabic music website Ma3azef published Young Rocky’s interview with Adam Ghanem, a Gazan rapper and producer who had been in the process of building a studio for his label Mine. 

“There were several goals from Mine, the first of which was that we were breaking our stereotype,” Ghanem told Rocky. “We do not want to be in the stereotypical image of the Gazan person. We want to sing about ourselves because in the end we are human beings, and in the end we have a life, we have friends, we have problems in the family, and all the normal tasks exist for us in Gaza, even though we are under siege and so on.”

Ghanem’s own account of multiple displacements since being forced to leave his home in Northern Gaza is but another harrowing tale in a litany of them. He speaks of finding solace in trying to work on beats and verses with close friend and fellow artist Al-Waari in the midst of the screams in the refugee shelter, of his lethargy which greeted the news the Mine studio had been bombed. He managed to make the crossing into Egypt and eventually Cairo, and his creative urgency remains, whatever the future holds for him and his community. 

“Wherever we are, we will record,” he declares. “Wherever we are, we will support the Palestinian scene, and wherever we are, we will also express ourselves and the Gazan community in the best way from our point of view, which is music. A few missiles won’t stop us either. I was raised in seven wars.”

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