El Khat – mute (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 44:01 minutes | 901 MB | Genre: World Fusion
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Glitterbeat Records
El Khat’s sound borrows heavily from Yemeni music, both traditional and modern, and updates it with rock and electronic influences. While this clinical description accurately captures the group’s innovative genre-crossing approach, it also understates how creatively they combine these influences into Mute’s wildly-original songs, arrangements, and recorded sound.
The band’s leader, Eyal El Wahab, has shared how profoundly Qat, Coffee & Qambus—a compilation of 1960s Yemeni 45s—influenced him, in part because of its connection to his Yemeni Jewish family origins. There is a clear line from the unidentifiable, splattery percussion on the compilation’s opening track by Fatimah Al-Zaelaeyah to the variety of percussion in Lotan Yaish’s kit, with its mix of conventional drums and repurposed kitchenware. El Wahab also uses a homemade instrument with roots in Yemeni traditions, derived from the qanbūs lute. El Wahab’s electric lute has four strings and a simple solid body, and he alternates plucking it like a guitar and bowing it like a cello.
On El Khat’s third album, Mute, they extend their culture-crossing vision further than on the earlier albums. They approach the studio and mixing with greater ambition, and exploit compression and distortion to generate a loud, visceral palette. Creative processing stretches sounds from the percussion and homemade lute until any organic origin becomes difficult to discern. Percussion sometimes moves to the foreground as in a techno mix, even as Yaish’s intricate rhythmic patterns draw heavily from older origins. Songs alternate between El Wahab’s solo voice and three voices singing in unison, with the ensemble vocals often set in a reverberant space.
El Wahab sings in Arabic, which he learned to speak as an adult. The language again ties to his family’s roots in Yemen, and his own nomadic experience. (El Khat formed in Tel Aviv and recently relocated to Berlin.) In the album’s press release, El Wahab explains how its title reflects his peaceful values: “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.” El Khat’s music both reflects these values, and combines them with El Wahab’s exploratory and ambitious vision and songwriting. – Steve Silverstein
Tracklist:
1-01. El Khat – Tislami Tislami (03:53)
1-02. El Khat – La waLa (05:11)
1-03. El Khat – Tabl Yamani (00:59)
1-04. El Khat – Commodore Lothan (05:10)
1-05. El Khat – Almania (06:25)
1-06. El Khat – Zafa (04:24)
1-07. El Khat – Zafa : Talaatam (03:29)
1-08. El Khat – Ward (04:20)
1-09. El Khat – DJ Saadia (01:46)
1-10. El Khat – Intissar (08:18)
