DJs add reggae, techno, hip hop beats to folk music and take Palestinian cause to places politics can’t reach
- For Palestinian artists ‘everything is political’, says film producer who gathered 10 international artists to make electronic music album Electrosteen
- The artists sampled recordings of hundreds of pieces of traditional music drawn from Palestinian archives
A mixing desk at her fingertips, the artist known as Sarouna coaxes a haunting refrain based around a bass track – music about both the past and the present.
Like other popular names in the Palestinian electronic music scene, the 23-year-old, wearing a hoodie emblazoned with “Made in Palestine” in Arabic, creates songs by drawing on local folk music.
“Why would I go for European styles, which I don’t really feel attached to?” she says in her bedroom studio overlooking the hills around Ramallah in the West Bank. “We will live this heritage so that we do not forget.”
Sarouna is one of the electronic artists involved in a project launched by Rashid Abdelhamid, a film producer, assisted by Sama Abdulhadi, who many consider the first Palestinian woman DJ.
They brought together 10 artists from the Palestinian territories, Israel, Britain, France and Jordan at a villa in Ramallah. From this two-week artistic residency in 2018, an album of 18 songs was born, titled Electrosteen – a word combining Electro and “Falesteen”, Arabic for Palestine.
