Middle Eastern Frequencies

Even in the virtual, interconnected present, independent music responds innately to its surroundings. In the case of experimental sounds hailing from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the escalating conflict in Gaza and wider regional instability are taking their toll on artists, promoters and cultural figures of all kinds.

“It’s not a very inspiring and comfortable situation now,” says Sharif Sehnaoui, taking a drag on his cigarette on the balcony of his Beirut apartment. “We’re not under fire ourselves, but I can tell you the feeling of everybody is complete and utter disgust. It pulls you down.”

Since the 90s, Sehnaoui has been part of the vaunted Beirut alternative music scene – a hotbed of noise rock, electronics and free improv which found a footing via Ziad Nawfal’s show on Radio Lebanon, leading to the formation of record labels like Ruptured and Al Maslakh, the Tunefork Studio run by musician and producer Fadi Tabbal, and the Irtijal festival, which Sehnaoui and Mazen Kerbaj founded in 2000. Despite the increasingly uncertain outlook, the 2024 edition of Irtijal is going ahead.

“We’re taking the least possible risks in terms of people travelling in because we have the distinct possibility we’ll need to cancel and re-book,” Sehnaoui explains. “We need to warn all foreign guests, ‘Hey, this is the situation here.’”

Whether digging into Sehnaoui’s recorded work in projects like “A” Trio and Calamita, or discovering the scores of Ruptured releases with Tabbal’s name on the credits, it’s immediately apparent how mature, varied and assured the city’s music scene is, spanning alt-rock, avant-garde electronics and leftfield beats through to drone, noise and free improvisation. It’s a prolific scene which springboarded from breakthrough 90s groups like Scrambled Eggs and Soap Kills to Nawfal’s Ruptured Sessions broadcasts – a Lebanese equivalent of the Peel Sessions – to nurture a swelling, inspired community of alternative musicians.

“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,” Sehnaoui 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, 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.”

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Beirut’s music scene may be flourishing despite tumultuous years of economic collapse, COVID-19, the port explosion of 2020 and the fuel crisis, but Lebanon is not an island and across the Arab world inspiring experimental music scenes are incubating in various states and sizes. Just as cultures intertwine within Lebanon, there are connections to explore amid the distinct cities of the MENA region with their own unique cultural and political situations.

In recent years Cairo has become a hotbed of high-impact, wildly inventive electronic music which was nurtured during a golden patch for the Egyptian capital, orbiting the VENT venue and Epic 101 Studios. “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 showed me what I can experiment with in terms of effects and vocal processing,” as evidenced by her 2016 EP BEITAK and her more recent collaboration with Sehnaoui’s improv rock trio Calamita.

3Phaz, one of the founders of Epic 101 Studios, nods to the post-revolution era between 2012 and 2015 as a particularly strong time for experimental music in Cairo, but he and Metwalli both suggest the lack of significant social change eventually demotivated people to maintain such initiatives. Tuesday nights at Cairo Jazz Club are considered one of the few reliable bastions for the city’s experimental music scene at present.

These days, 3Phaz is focused on developing his musical practice, which now ranks him among the most interesting producers working in leftfield club music in the city. Although his sound initially took cues from Egypt-specific electro styles like mahraganat and chaabi, captured on the 2020 album Three Phase, he’s since consciously moved into less geographically defined zones of exploration.

“I got a bit scared, because I felt like I’d been pigeonholed into this mahraganat-referencing musician,” he explains. “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 Egypt or from somewhere else, there’s this sense of having to exoticise this person and attaching the region to what they’re doing.”

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3Phaz’ attitude draws interesting parallels with Lyon-based, Tunis-rooted label Shouka, which similarly fuses modernist club production with a geographically ambiguous sound palette. The label was founded by Amine Metani, who also performs as Metttani and helms the Arabstazy collective [he’s also regularly collaborated with EMEL]; artists on Shouka often make a point of embracing Tunisian culture in their source material, but they refuse to be limited or categorised by their heritage. The liner notes for the 2018 Arabstazy compilation, Under Frustration (Volume One), are instructive: ‘This musical journey stands for the diversity of this scene, and deconstructs the occidental perception 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.’

Standout Shouka artist Amine Nouri, aka Nuri, channels his own background in drumming into dynamic percussive workouts that omnivorously draw on a broad sweep of dance music styles. His debut album Drup sounds distinctly non-Western, which an untrained ear might lazily presume to mean it’s Tunisian music, but like 3Phaz, Nuri refuses to be restrained by where he comes from.

“For my music style, I don’t limit myself only to the MENA region, but to the worldwide audience,” Nuri says. “I don’t identify myself with one specific culture. 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.”

If club music from the Arabstazy collective, 3Phaz and similarly spirited artists showcases a distinct approach, it stands in opposition to the conventional Western strains of house and techno which have long resided comfortably in more mainstream clubs across the MENA region. The artists, label managers and promoters seeking something more unique are often trying to build experimental music scenes from nothing. That seems to be especially true of the Jordanian capital, Amman. 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 communities, they love their scenes and what they’re a part of,” says Abdallah Taher, aka Shusmo, a central figure in Amman’s alternative music scene. “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 create a community.”

Taher has been actively putting on events and DJing in Amman for a long time, but he speaks with enthusiasm about a more recent endeavour that signalled a positive development in the city. In 2022, MNFA opened, a performance space two storeys deep in an unused car park. It offered a nexus to an emergent wave of non-conformist Jordanian artists such as Big Murk, Toumba and 1800s Internet.

“Amer Manaseer and Abdallah Dabbas took it upon themselves to open a venue that 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 October 7 [the attack by Hamas on Israel in 2023] happened. Till this day, they haven’t 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.”

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 frame their mission 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 Shereen Amarin, “to create our own little place inside of Jordan.”

After an initial run of events, Drowned By Locals evolved into a label that explicitly rejected statehood in favour of meaningful connection with kindred wayward spirits in the virtual realm. Among 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 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.”

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If the stakes feel high for controversial expression in Jordan, they’re even higher in Tehran. In the Iranian capital, there was a moment around 2017 when optimism crept into a burgeoning scene of noise and avant-garde electronic music orbiting galleries and black box theatre spaces. In the past six years however, the fallout from the collapse of the US-Iran nuclear deal meant a crashing economy and a rise in hard-line, right-wing factions in the government.

Siavash Amini was involved in the SET music festival, which was aiming to foster a scene and connect with international audiences in the mid-2010s, all the while developing his own musical practice. His 2014 album, Till Human Voices Wake Us, established him as a leading light in Iranian electronic music alongside similarly spirited peers such as Ata Ebtekar (aka Sote). Amini’s approach varies from release to release, but it’s steeped in an academic look at the region’s history of classical music and a natural inclination to noise and drone which tracks with the wider affinity for sonic abrasion across the Middle East.

Speaking over a VPN connection, Amini describes a younger generation creating a different sort of underground in contemporary 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, he laments the loss of what they were developing, but 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, with her partner Milad Bagheri, formed NUM as a trip-hop project in 2010 in the Iranian town of Rasht, before heading into increasingly experimental sonic realms. It’s forbidden for women to sing in public in Iran, among other restrictions, so for Sirvan, staying was not an option. Moving to Georgia, and then Canada, afforded her space to develop her music in a way which was simply impossible in Iran. Her 2021 album, Feast on My Body, is a fierce, unnerving work which hinges on distorted vocals and impressionistic noise.

“My life is woven with anger and anxiety… 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.”

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Inevitably, chaos forms something of a backdrop which binds together these distinct music scenes. Political and societal upheaval is woven into the region through a myriad of historical threads – not least the looming shadow of Western colonialism. Noise, or indeed its ambient antidote, forms an urgent sonic impetus whether it’s found in the churning, grinding overtones coming from Tunefork Studios in Beirut, crackling on the surface of pristine productions from Cairo and Tunis or accenting the heavily swung percussion of Palestinian pioneer Muqata’a.

“There’s a sense of bipolarism, of noise versus calm… in almost everybody’s tracks,” says Fadi Tabbal. He’s referring directly to the Beirut music scene, but the message feels applicable on a wider regional level. “There’s never a moment in Beirut, or even in Lebanon, where it’s calm. Calm does not exist. You have noise all over town and it kind of becomes your musical home. I mix these noises with a certain imagination, rearrange them and create escapism. I build these ambient works based on a lot of dissonance and sonic intensity, turning what is heavy and offensive during my days into a sort of shelter.”

This article originally appeared in the May 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe to Songlines today