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

Web of Influences - Muqata’a

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Web of Influences - Muqata’a