Releases
El Khat • mute
Release Date: 13/09/2024
Format: LP/CD/DL
Cat-No: GBCD/LP 152
01. Tislami Tislami (03:53)
02. La waLa (05:11)
03. Tabl Yamani (00:59)
04. Commodore Lothan (05:10)
05. Almania (06:25)
06. Zafa (04:24)
07. Zafa : Talaatam (03:29)
08. Ward (04:20)
09. DJ Saadia (01:46)
10. Intissar (08:18)
“El Khat make joyful clatter…everything is recycled metal, plastic or wood, all coming together in a funereal march that sounds like a huge, disgruntled anima shaking itself into life.”
— The Financial Times
El Khat’s 3rd album mute belies its title as it careens out of the speakers with a raucous intensity. Formed in the garages and warehouses of Jaffa and now based in Berlin, the group’s ever-expanding vision makes a defiant stand against complacency, conflict and division. Skittering drums and brass, a jagged organ, hypnotic Yemeni melodies and one-of-a-kind DIY percussion and string instruments, all meld together in an infectious, heady soundscape.
Sometimes wildly raw, sometimes lush and enveloping. Always uncompromised and adventurous.
Mute. As a noun it means refraining from speech; a device placed over the bridge of a stringed instrument; or something that temporarily turns off sound. As a verb, to mute is to deaden, muffle, or soften sound. Muting is the opposite of openness and communication and for Eyal el Wahab, the man behind El Khat, it’s a vital word, one which he’s chosen very carefully for the title of the band’s third album.
“Every distance between two people is an opportunity for conflict. Two of anything creates sides and sides create conflict. In such cases there will be muting,” el Wahab explains.
Mute is an album that explores distance, speech – and the lack of it. It’s a series of musings on people, places – and leaving.
The record began life with the core of El Khat – multi-instrumentalist el Wahab, percussionist Lotan Yaish and organist Yefet Hasan – recording in an isolated village underground shelter. “My state of mind at the time affected the compositions even before I wrote the music,” el Wahab notes, “and the isolated location gave us a chance to make sense of that.” Following those sessions, in the summer of 2023 the group emigrated to Berlin; a far cry from Jaffa, where they’d largely grown up. The move was an expression of the nomadic urge that has been a constant in el Wahab’s life, one that flows directly into his work.
“These songs are about emigrating, leaving someone or somewhere. I don’t think I’ve stayed in any one place for more than a year. For us Arab Jews whose families were forced to leave Yemen, it really began with that big move and our families’ arrival in Israel, a land with a constant muting of the ‘other’.”
Mute, he feels, is “a big and meaningful record.” It’s a story of endings and new beginnings. “But that’s true of all our albums” el Wahab insists. “They’re about relationships and the struggle to see two sides as a whole and not something that ends with muting and conflict. The songs here are about old loves, country, family. They are about feelings and identity.” And all of that inevitably brings up many questions. As he sings on “La Wala”: “Why can’t you never enjoy the moment you’re in/ And always says goodbye/ Why? Why?”
El Wahab keeps reinventing himself: even his career has been an act self-invention. Unable to read music, he still managed to talk his way into the Andalusian Orchestra, playing cello by ear until he learned music theory. And instruments he uses on his albums, like the blue gallon (actually a jug) or the kubana (named after a type of Yemeni bread) are also self-invented. These handmade, one-of-a-kind instruments sit at the heart of mute. He’s always made music from the items others discard. Everything recycled and reused, nothing wasted.
This same minimalist spirit echoes in El Khat’s melodies. They are unadorned and direct, inspired by the Yemeni traditional music that el Wahab heard in recordings from the 1960s. At times the songs are very close to the broad appeal of pop music, as with mute’s surging, powerful opening track and first single, “Tislami Tislami,” where the tune sweeps up the listener. But, he notes, while it might have the structure of pop, it is created “with more focus on character. Mute really feels like a continuation of what we did on our last album, Aalbat Alawi Op.99. It’s like the B-side, more pages in the chapter.”
But that doesn’t mean the album is without surprises, like the curiously off-kilter rhythm of “Commodore Lothan” and its jaggedly seductive organ line. “The song is a joke, really,” el Wahab laughs. “Basically, it’s about us the band and our drummer Lotan Yaish. He’s Commander Lothan, that’s a nickname we have for him.” It’s a light moment among the questions and sorrows that ache through other songs. Lines like “Forgiveness, forgiveness will create less mistakes/Between us” (“Zafa”), or “Someone now is on a quest for a new/ground” (“Intissar”) tell their tales of searching and doubt.
“Doubt is great,” el Wahab says. “It saves me. A lot of people easily determine between good and bad but I believe they are linked together depending from which angle you are looking. That’s what I’ve been dealing with in my writing: opening up to both sides. Listening, being completely aware, without labelling, without muting.” That sense of openness permeates the songs. The album can be ghostly, like the brief percussive interlude “Tabl Yamani” or the refracted quarter-tones of “Almania.” It can also be insistent and headlong, as heard in the brass-driven rush of “Zafa: Talaatam” and the pulsing melodicism of “Ward.”
Mute is an infectious heady mixture, sometimes wildly raw, sometimes lush and enveloping. Always uncompromised and adventurous.
“You’re dealing with the past even while you’re looking to the future” el Wahab says “and it’s not quite real. Only the present moment is real.” In terms of the “present moment” in Western Asia, he adds, “we Arab Jews of Yemeni origin condemn the war in Gaza. The war is a mute, the actions of leaders are a mute, dividing Islam and Judaism or any other religion is a mute. Judging people based on their skin colour, where they were born, or ethnicity is a mute.”
“I cannot even share my feelings with my friends and family anymore” he continues. “People only see themselves instead of the entire picture, that ‘whole’ where we all complete each other and cannot be separated as if we were different parts of a human body.”
Mute captures those present moments and the questions El Khat are asking. And that, Eyal el Wahab insists, is exactly the point. “I want to ask. I don’t need to get an answer.”
Releases
El Khat • Albat Alawi Op.99
Release Date: 25/03/2022
Format: CD/LP+DL/DL
Cat-No: GBCD/LP 121
01. Maafan (04:46)
02. Djaja (03:30)
03. La Sama (04:00)
04. Muftaha (01:40)
05. Ala Al Ma (04:09)
06. Alba (01:34)
07. El Khat (04:50)
08. Naksah al Ras .1 (01:33)
09. Naksah al Ras .2 (02:16)
10. Leilat Al Henna (05:58)
11. Said Min A’Sawad (03:58)
12. Albat Alawi Op.99 (01:23)
Rough-hewn and exhilarating, EL Khat’s second album “Albat Alawi Op.99” is a deep dive into leader Eyal el Wahab’s Yemenite roots and their inspired re-imaginings. A careening orchestra of percussion, horns, strings, electricity and el Wahab’s own DIY instruments. Mesmerizing retro-futurist sounds.
————————————————————————
El Khat. Named for the drug used so widely chewed across the Middle East, the band’s music is certainly addictive, more so with each outing. Their second album, Albat Alawi Op.99, is a disc full of joys, where the melodies unfold one after the other, involving and catchy.
“I tried to be simple in the structure,” explains Eyal el Wahab, the group’s leader and heart, who composed and arranged almost everything on the album. Albat Alawi Op.99 is very much his vision. “It’s a bit like pop music, where the soul is four chords and a melody. The difference is in the expression.”
That sense of expression and meaning flows through the first single, “Djaja,” where he sings “From Yemen and beyond America/ We are all together and I am alone.” This is music that both looks over the shoulder to his family’s past and forward to the world that lies outside.
El Wahab plays many of the instruments on the album, things like the dli and the kearat that he constructed himself. A skilled carpenter, it’s something he started doing several years ago, using his skills to make music from the items people discard. A child of the Yemeni diaspora who’s grown up in Tel Aviv Jaffa, Israel, it’s a practice that harks back to the family homeland, where even rubbish can become an instrument.
“People simply play on a tin can there,” he says. “Here, people thrown things out, treasure or junk, and I transform it.”
But el Wahab has always been a man of invention. He talked his way into the Jerusalem Andalusian Orchestra as a cellist, self-taught from busking and unable to read music, learning the repertoire by ear as he went along, and picking up music theory. It gave him a strong foundation, but his world changed when he was given ‘Qat, Coffee & Qambus: Raw 45s from Yemen’ an LP of Yemeni traditional music from the 1960s. It came as an epiphany. He quit the orchestra, began building instruments and put together El Khat.
Albat Alawi Op.99 is an album of glorious contrasts, from the fiery workout of “Ala Al Ma” to the title cut which closes the album. It is a piece, el Wahab notes, “that has no regular instruments. Everything is made from metal or plastic or wood.” The track is the embodiment of his scavenging, recycling ethos, a powerful statement; for him “it was important for it to be there right at the end.”
Like all music in 2020, the recording of Albat Alawi Op.99 was affected by the global pandemic. Israel enforced a very strict, early lockdown to try and halt the progress of Covid, so the band couldn’t meet. “You can write at home, anywhere,” el Wahab says. “But we hit an obstacle with the quarantine here. It was almost impossible to get together to rehearse or make the album. In the end we recorded separately, doing everything in layers. At one point, though, I did manage to have a choir of seven people in the living room, singing into two microphones.”
Then, as the country’s first lockdown ended, the process was put on hold again as two of the band went to live in the desert for six months, far from phones and computers. It meant that the album wasn’t completed until the spring of 2021, and what emerged surprised him.
“Once you have put something on paper, you have an idea of what is what, but it changes when it’s played. With this album, there turned out to be so much depth.”
It’s an album filled with emotions, starting with the lonely clarion call of the violin on the opener “Ma’afan,” a barnstormer of a song that builds on the foundation of a simple riff to become something majestic, the percussion as powerful as any of the melodic instruments, before exploding into a final glory of brass. It makes for a breathtaking starting point, setting a pace that keeps marching on. “La Sama” begins with brooding piano notes to become a prayer of hope: “No sky, no blue/How high can you dream?”
“El Khat,” fittingly for a song named after the band, offers a broad welcome, a thick, inviting groove powered by bass and percussion, with some scorching guitar work as crown of its creation.
Where the last album, Saadia Jefferon, saw Eyal el Wahab bring a funky, psychedelic re-imagination to the traditional Yemeni songs that electrified him when he first heard them, this is a disc almost entirely filled with his own compositions, something close and personal that constantly looks back to his family’s homeland on the Arabian Peninsula.
“I don’t have a message,” he says. “I just want to be closer to my roots, to express myself better. And the concept of using what people don’t need is vital. A tin can is so important to me. It’s not trash.”
Nothing is wasted. Even the album’s title, Albat Alawi Op.99, is pieced together from other things. It’s partly an homage to Faisal Alawi, a popular Yemeni singer who died in 2010, along with an alba, a small tin box that can contain many treasures, while the Op.99 is intended to give the compositions “the same respect as Western classical music.”
Open the alba. Discover the treasures that are waiting inside
El Khat
“El Khat make joyful clatter…everything is recycled metal, plastic or wood, all coming together in a funereal march that sounds like a huge, disgruntled anima shaking itself into life.”
— The Financial Times
El Khat’s 3rd album mute belies its title as it careens out of the speakers with a raucous intensity. Formed in the garages and warehouses of Jaffa and now based in Berlin, the group’s ever-expanding vision makes a defiant stand against complacency, conflict and division. Skittering drums and brass, a jagged organ, hypnotic Yemeni melodies and one-of-a-kind DIY percussion and string instruments, all meld together in an infectious, heady soundscape.
Sometimes wildly raw, sometimes lush and enveloping. Always uncompromised and adventurous.
Mute. As a noun it means refraining from speech; a device placed over the bridge of a stringed instrument; or something that temporarily turns off sound. As a verb, to mute is to deaden, muffle, or soften sound. Muting is the opposite of openness and communication and for Eyal el Wahab, the man behind El Khat, it’s a vital word, one which he’s chosen very carefully for the title of the band’s third album.
“Every distance between two people is an opportunity for conflict. Two of anything creates sides and sides create conflict. In such cases there will be muting,” el Wahab explains.
Mute is an album that explores distance, speech – and the lack of it. It’s a series of musings on people, places – and leaving.
The record began life with the core of El Khat – multi-instrumentalist el Wahab, percussionist Lotan Yaish and organist Yefet Hasan – recording in an isolated village underground shelter. “My state of mind at the time affected the compositions even before I wrote the music,” el Wahab notes, “and the isolated location gave us a chance to make sense of that.” Following those sessions, in the summer of 2023 the group emigrated to Berlin; a far cry from Jaffa, where they’d largely grown up. The move was an expression of the nomadic urge that has been a constant in el Wahab’s life, one that flows directly into his work.
“These songs are about emigrating, leaving someone or somewhere. I don’t think I’ve stayed in any one place for more than a year. For us Arab Jews whose families were forced to leave Yemen, it really began with that big move and our families’ arrival in Israel, a land with a constant muting of the ‘other’.”
Mute, he feels, is “a big and meaningful record.” It’s a story of endings and new beginnings. “But that’s true of all our albums” el Wahab insists. “They’re about relationships and the struggle to see two sides as a whole and not something that ends with muting and conflict. The songs here are about old loves, country, family. They are about feelings and identity.” And all of that inevitably brings up many questions. As he sings on “La Wala”: “Why can’t you never enjoy the moment you’re in/ And always says goodbye/ Why? Why?”
El Wahab keeps reinventing himself: even his career has been an act self-invention. Unable to read music, he still managed to talk his way into the Andalusian Orchestra, playing cello by ear until he learned music theory. And instruments he uses on his albums, like the blue gallon (actually a jug) or the kubana (named after a type of Yemeni bread) are also self-invented. These handmade, one-of-a-kind instruments sit at the heart of mute. He’s always made music from the items others discard. Everything recycled and reused, nothing wasted.
This same minimalist spirit echoes in El Khat’s melodies. They are unadorned and direct, inspired by the Yemeni traditional music that el Wahab heard in recordings from the 1960s. At times the songs are very close to the broad appeal of pop music, as with mute’s surging, powerful opening track and first single, “Tislami Tislami,” where the tune sweeps up the listener. But, he notes, while it might have the structure of pop, it is created “with more focus on character. Mute really feels like a continuation of what we did on our last album, Aalbat Alawi Op.99. It’s like the B-side, more pages in the chapter.”
But that doesn’t mean the album is without surprises, like the curiously off-kilter rhythm of “Commodore Lothan” and its jaggedly seductive organ line. “The song is a joke, really,” el Wahab laughs. “Basically, it’s about us the band and our drummer Lotan Yaish. He’s Commander Lothan, that’s a nickname we have for him.” It’s a light moment among the questions and sorrows that ache through other songs. Lines like “Forgiveness, forgiveness will create less mistakes/Between us” (“Zafa”), or “Someone now is on a quest for a new/ground” (“Intissar”) tell their tales of searching and doubt.
“Doubt is great,” el Wahab says. “It saves me. A lot of people easily determine between good and bad but I believe they are linked together depending from which angle you are looking. That’s what I’ve been dealing with in my writing: opening up to both sides. Listening, being completely aware, without labelling, without muting.” That sense of openness permeates the songs. The album can be ghostly, like the brief percussive interlude “Tabl Yamani” or the refracted quarter-tones of “Almania.” It can also be insistent and headlong, as heard in the brass-driven rush of “Zafa: Talaatam” and the pulsing melodicism of “Ward.”
Mute is an infectious heady mixture, sometimes wildly raw, sometimes lush and enveloping. Always uncompromised and adventurous.
“You’re dealing with the past even while you’re looking to the future” el Wahab says “and it’s not quite real. Only the present moment is real.” In terms of the “present moment” in Western Asia, he adds, “we Arab Jews of Yemeni origin condemn the war in Gaza. The war is a mute, the actions of leaders are a mute, dividing Islam and Judaism or any other religion is a mute. Judging people based on their skin colour, where they were born, or ethnicity is a mute.”
“I cannot even share my feelings with my friends and family anymore” he continues. “People only see themselves instead of the entire picture, that ‘whole’ where we all complete each other and cannot be separated as if we were different parts of a human body.”
Mute captures those present moments and the questions El Khat are asking. And that, Eyal el Wahab insists, is exactly the point. “I want to ask. I don’t need to get an answer.”