This September 10th, join us for a special, must-see performance from visiting musicians, El Khat. On a US album release tour, they're playing Baltimore for the first time! Grab a ticket and learn more about their work below.
EVENT DETAILS
El Khat (Berlin) with DLI (Baltimore)
Tues, 9/10 | Doors 7PM
$15 ($20 at door)
ABOUT EL KHAT
Formed in the garages and warehouses of Jaffa and now based in Berlin, El Khat is a Yemeni trio making joyful, lush, and adventurous music that is impossible to pigeon-hole into a single genre. Their retrofuturistic sound is inspired by traditional Yemeni songs, contemporary grooves, and a collection of DIY instruments handmade by band leader Eyal El Wahab.
The result is a conjuring of compelling soundscapes that are both informed by and transcendent to their diasporic Yemeni and Middle Eastern roots.
A true original... El Khat is fascinating and disconcerting, unlike anything else you are likely to hear.
El Khat'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 into an infectious, heady aural experience which is sometimes wildly raw, sometimes lush and enveloping, always uncompromised and adventurous. [LISTEN HERE]
El Khat makes 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)
On El Khat's latest album, mute
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.
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?”
“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 labeling, 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.”
“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.”
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