The Palestinian artist Muqata’a name means “disruption” or “interference.” It’s an apt moniker for someone whose music is an attempt to break the system and provoke intense emotions. On releases like Kamil Manqus and Singles, he processes the harrowing realities of the present moment while also communicating to ancestors and unseen spiritual forces via sampling and sound collage. In his music, field recordings of airstrikes, the sounds of Ramallah’s streets, and the clank of gates at Israeli checkpoints are shot through with rapid-fire jungle breaks, visceral rumbles of sub-bass, and grainy, haunting samples pulled from his grandparents’ cherished Arabic records. 

Muqata’a has been producing since the late 90s, after his mother’s cousin gifted him a magazine that contained a free download CD of EJay, a rudimentary music production software. Shortly after, he began rapping over his beats as a more direct means of documenting the struggle, co-founding the Ramallah Underground collective in 2002 as a means to showcase the city’s creative talent to the world. The crew disbanded in 2009 but he is still referred to as “the godfather of Palestinian hip-hop,” though these days he often prefers to express himself via frequencies, effects, and samples rather than the microphone. 

His most recent performance, False Vectors—a collaboration with video artist Fairouz Hasan at Germany’s Monheim Triennale festival, a home for one-of-a-kind experimental and improvisational collaborations—was a sparse, raw, and non-linear audio-visual treatise on birth and death, fragmented geography, interrupted history, and thwarted attempts to build and reconstruct. I caught up with Muqata’a at the Monheim Triennale to learn more about the moody soundscapes and protest music that have shaped him as an artist.

Can you remember the first piece of music that you ever heard that had an impact on you?

Muqata’a: It was music that my parents would have been listening to when I was a kid. A lot of popular Arabic music, like Egyptian and Lebanese music—that’s where a lot of the music in the Arab world comes from because they're the two places in the region that have music industries. This was the early ’90s, when I was just grasping what music is, and a lot of the political content would be anti-colonial—even if the music itself doesn’t sound like it, the lyrics were militant. Like Lebanese Rahbani music, which Fairuz came out of. Sheikh Imam to me is the first punk music I ever heard. This guy was playing the oud and singing with not necessarily a beautiful voice. It’s very raw stuff—he’s just shouting poetry, clearing his throat, taking a chug of whiskey, people talking in the background. That was one of the things that really made me see music in a different way than what we would see on TV or hear on the radio. These artists weren’t “pop” though they were very popular—everyone would listen to them.

What was the first music that you fell in love with that felt like your own?

The first thing I started listening to independently from my parents was the hip-hop my older brother would listen to. First it started with things like Dr Dre, 2Pac, Snoop Dogg, and then slowly it went into more political and socially-conscious hip-hop, like Mos Def and Talib Qweli. And then the thing I discovered away from that was the whole Bristol scene, which is more like trip-hop and the jungle and drum ’n’ bass stuff. I was really into Tricky, Massive Attack, Portishead. That’s kind of the same time that I discovered I wanted to make music as well. I had already been taking piano lessons since I was seven or so but they were separate worlds, and then they kind of collided.

You started creating your first beats when you were in some sort of lockdown, right?

I was already making beats—like, really different experimental stuff because I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. But I started writing and rapping during a curfew, because I felt like I needed to be more direct in expressing myself and how I feel about the things that are happening around me—basically, the Israeli occupation of my city and my country. I'm under curfew, I'm under house arrest, I’m looking out the window, and there's an Israeli tank that could shoot at any moment. So I had that fear and that feeling of needing to do more than just being observant and being abstract with what I do, so I started writing lyrics. I feel like that's also when I found more meaning in what I'm doing musically.

Had you already started the Ramallah Underground collective at that time?

No, that happened a few years after. Ramallah Underground was supposed to be a website, like a platform that would have all different underground art—music, poetry, literature, photography—coming out of the city. But then it quickly shifted into this group, like a band of three of us, because we started getting bookings. Via that group, we also became really kind of confined into this specific “rap trio,” even though we were doing a lot of different stuff: experimenting with jazz, broken beats, noisy stuff. Those bookings kind of dictated our path as a group, and then I think that's why it ended kind of abruptly. 

In the beginning, we were excited about getting bookings and traveling and getting paid and all that, so we were just like, “Yeah, let's do it.” Then a few years down the line, we started to discuss the idea of “Are we being tokenized?” because our positioning at the festivals didn’t make sense to the kind of music that we make. So we started to refuse certain shows and that was difficult for us but it paid off in the end. We had to shake that off, refocus, and then present ourselves the way we want to be presented, not like “Ramallah Underground and a falafel sandwich on the side.” We're musicians first, right? We make music to express ourselves, and we happen to be Palestinians, not the other way around. Our work is very political and of course it talks about Palestine, because that's where we're from. You talk about your neighborhood, you know? You talk about your experience.

I was really surprised to see on your Instagram that despite everything that's happening, you’re still traveling to play shows in Palestine.

Yeah, I mean, it's not easy at all to have anything organized at the moment, because things are very inconsistent. The last two shows that I was supposed to perform two weeks ago were part of an event series that’s been taking place for the past year that’s about reimagining forms of cultural resistance. But my shows in Ramallah and Bethlehem were canceled due to the closures—it was supposed to be a collaborative performance and then the artists from the other cities couldn't come to Ramallah, and I couldn't go to the other cities. 

It’s very difficult for things to be organized because of the ongoing genocide, a slow one in the West Bank, and a very escalated and direct one in Gaza. It’s a difficult time to be talking about music and culture. Culture itself, even though it’s very important, has a very difficult time positioning itself in this whole reality. Parties are not happening at all, but live performance, film screenings are ... But, I mean, we're always under attack, right? Our culture is under attack. Our cuisine is under attack. Our land is being taken. So it's really important for us to find a way to fight back in any shape, any form, any way possible.

It's crazy to think about the whole journey of even getting to Ramallah from anywhere right now. 

I live between Palestine and Berlin, so I go back a lot, and it's never been easy. It's not just in the past two years during the the genocide on Gaza, it's always been difficult. Israel controls the borders. And they close it whenever they want. They open it whenever they want. It's also really expensive and it's extremely violent, the way they control your life. You cannot have any form of consistency in your life—it's impossible to plan anything. Nothing is stable, nothing is certain, and they keep us in that state all the time. And I think that translates a lot to the kind of music that I make. Nothing just keeps going, nothing is stable. It's always broken. It always changes its path.

You’ve made a lot of different types of music and played in a lot of different contexts. What do you feel are the through-lines that run through all your productions?

It’s really important that the sound is more felt than heard—that it's actually physical. That’s maybe the reason why I use a lot of sub frequencies. I feel like I try to kind of push back; there is a sort of aggression in the sound, which expresses the violence that we go through. It’s like fighting back sonically.

What are some of your favorite audio effects?

I really love using delays on step sequencers, which creates a sort of glitch effect. My favorite effect is on the SP-404. It’s effect number 24; I forgot what it's called even, but it’s my go-to for stuttering the hell out of a sound and changing its pitch. Reason [software] is like the brain of my studio; I’ve been using it for 20 years now. There’s a plug-in there called Pulverizer, which saturates the sound and over-compresses it and then distorts it. It makes everything really intensely squashed. It’s something that feels really loud but it’s not because it’s really squashed together and it’s not being allowed to explode. I feel like that sound really expresses a lot of how I feel being a colonized person, and living in a colonized community under military occupation, and ongoing ethnic cleansing. Kind of like this pressure where you're about to explode but you don't know when. 

That brings us to the next thing: I timestretch everything a lot. I just grab a sample and stretch the hell out of it until you can hear the grains of it. Things are broken. The sounds are not even attached to each other. As a melody, it was supposed to be like a flute sample, and now it's just, like, dots, you know? Just some choppy shit. I do a lot of field recordings. I used to use a nice Tascam recorder, but now I just use my phone, because it's always there. I never go out with the intention to record something; I’m just in a place and I hear a sound that sounds close to how I would like to make a sound, so I just steal it, sample it, timestretch it, compress it.

What are some sounds you’ve recorded in the field recently?

The last thing I recorded is the sound of leaving Palestine on the Israeli border. After you stamp your passport to exit, there's another small checkpoint and then there’s this … In Palestine, we call it ma’ata, but I don't know what that translates to in English. It’s basically like when you have a chicken farm and there’s these two gates the animal has to pass through, like at a slaughterhouse basically. The gates have interlocking horizontal bars that flip and if you want to pass, you're going to get squashed in between. So you have to wait for the right moment where the Israeli soldier presses the button so you can actually enter and then exit. So I recorded the sound of those, and we're going to use it in the performance tonight.

It seems like sampling and recording stuff around you is very crucial to your process of music-making and making your music personal.

You know, literally everything is being taken away from you. Your loved ones are being killed by Israel. Your land is being taken. I'm not from Ramallah originally. My family is from the north—from Safad, on the border of Lebanon. Our city is completely ethnically cleansed, so we're not allowed to even visit that place. My mother's from Jaffa, which is today Tel Aviv, and that's been taken away. History has been taken away from you. Your music has been taken away. So sampling is kind of like holding on to something, right? Being able to capture some sounds, moments, ideas; just being able to hold on to that and utilizing it somehow. Sampling also has to do with time and history, so it’s all these things together.

We do have this urgency to to produce because we're basically not allowed to produce anything physical. Like in Palestine, if you open a factory, they'll bomb it. If you open a radio station, they're gonna come and shut it down. So you can't hold onto anything, not even yourself. Everything that's actually physical has been taken away from you, so sound becomes your most physical object. Somehow, sampling becomes even way more important—this whole urgency to produce sound and to sample and to resample and to process sounds becomes more physical than you can imagine.

What are some albums you’ve listened to over and over?

One of my favorite albums would be the Madvillainy record from MF Doom and Madlib. Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides is definitely one of my favorite albums. I've been listening a lot to what Hyperdub has been releasing over the past few years, especially Aya. Aya’s i’m hole is a really, really good album.

Who are a couple Palestinian artists you think people should check out?

Definitely Julmud. Also Haykal. And then there's this recent two-disc album called Only Sounds That Tremble Through Us by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. The first disc is their album—they usually do installation work and they put together this album from that. The second disc is a compilation of various artists like DJ Haram, Drew McDowall, Hiro Kone, and SCRAAATCH, which I’m also on. Yeah, that's super recommended.

Photo Credit: Niclas Weber