Deena Abdelwahed: Confounding Expectations

Born in Qatar, where she lived until the age of 18, Deena Abdelwahed moved to Tunisia and learned how to DJ under the tutelage of the World Full of Bass collective. Later moving to Paris to become part of the Arabstazy multidisciplinary artist platform, the budding DJ/producer traveled across Europe and the Arab world playing improvised live sets before deciding to focus on her own solo project.

The release of Abdelwahed’s debut LP Khonnar in 2018 offered a confrontational blend of grimy techno and industrial club sounds mixed with synthesized Arabic instrumentation and lyrics, sung mostly in Tunisian Arabic. Its foreboding, evocative tones dismantled the mysticism often ascribed to North African music to explore themes of social injustice within the context of a pro-democratic youth movement. 

Five years later and Abdelwahed’s third album, Jbal Rsas, seeks to shift the epicenter of contemporary electronic music yet further, absorbing and exploring new global topographies. Re-appropriating traditional sounds from across the Arabic region in electronic form, Abdelwahed’s compelling club constructions establish a genuinely innovative sound world full of sonic possibilities.

How did you first get involved with the Parisian Arabstazy collective?

I worked with the World Full of Bass collective as a DJ and then Arabstazy in 2015, which was basically the name of an event that was taking place in France. They liked the music I was making, so I asked if they could help me with my compositions and started joining in with their communal live sets. It was interesting to work with people who had a bit more experience than me that could help develop my sound. They knew where I was coming from and that gave me a bit of confidence.

At this stage, was your primary motivation to DJ or produce? 

I started as a DJ in Tunis, learned how to perform and got a bit of notoriety DJing club music that didn’t necessarily have a direct relationship with Arabic music. I tried to introduce baile funk, juke, footwork and other global sub-genres with the idea of showing people that there was more to club music than just conventional techno and house. Traditional music like baile funk was not known, but when I introduced it to dancefloors people started to get really familiar with the instruments and the traditional aspect of it. Everything started from there really and when I DJ now I’m still interested in trying to evolve these traditional forms of music.

Have you found that there’s a disconnection amongst audiences when you perform Arabic music in a traditional club environment?

It feels to me like there is a global memory where people have got used to the idea that when they hear synthesized sound it immediately translates as Western contemporary music. The big challenge that I and similar producers are facing is that it’s all about perception. While one person will perceive my music as a fusion, I perceive it as Arabic music using synthetic sounds. The idea behind my compositions is that the skeleton of the music, such as the rhythmic and melodic patterns, should be Arabic but made with Western tools using samples or a DAW like Ableton Live.  

Most producers looking to adapt a musical genre might use traditional music as some sort of gateway, but you seem to reverse that? 

It’s a challenge to make generic Arabic music because the scene is really large and there’s such a variety of elements, rhythms and melodies. For example, people in the Gulf region don’t get Tunisian music because they don’t understand the sound or the dialect. There are artists like Acid Arab who do something interesting because they’re very skilled at using sequencers and drum machines. In Arabic, dom is the bass and tak is the snare, so the basis of Arabic rhythmic music can be simplified as dom, dom, tak, tak, dom, tak tak, and Acid Arab does such a good job of putting these Egyptian rhythms into a sequencer or drum machine and creating a sound skeleton that respects the patterns of Algerian music where everything other than the bass or the kick is sampled. Tunisian producer Ammar 808 has also worked with the same idea for about five years now. These artists inspire me so much because, to my knowledge, not many other producers are doing what we are and it feels like we’re a collective. 

Beyond the music, is there also a motivation to break down certain cultural mindsets? 

That’s my first motivation because I want to show that it’s sad when people think that they’re modern and intellectual just because they follow the dominant culture. During the Islamic crusades in the 600s to the north of Africa in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, the main language, Amazigh (or what people called Berber), got pulled away, but not by force – it was actually a soft or cultural colonization. In order to associate with then-contemporary culture and science, the people had to speak the language of the colonizer or the ones who proclaimed the new religion, in this case, Arabic. So little by little, their language and cultural identity was stripped away for the sake of modernity and that is what is happening to us now in the Western world, albeit in a more violent and hostile way because if you don’t speak English or French you can’t even get a job. That’s why I find that people who go to clubs and consider themselves open-minded or think that they are better than people who listen to Arabic music are actually the opposite.

Your first album Khonnar was quite dark. An indication perhaps of your own pent up frustrations and philosophical views at the time?

In pop music that comes from the Arabic region, most of the songs are about love or other individualistic themes, but I didn’t feel this music spoke for the Tunisian public. I wanted to represent people who were fed up with misogyny in a society that was somehow pitching itself as the guardian of us. The population is only 12 million, but there is a polarity between those who are super-closed-minded and those who are liberal, politically and culturally. Right after the 2018 revolution, everyone was euphoric – a curtain went up and the complexity of society was on the table and in front of everyone. We were all observing and learning about each other and I wanted to reveal that emotion through the music.

Can you tell us about your latest album Jbal Rsas and the process behind how you’ve sought to re-appropriate Arabic dance music?

For this record, I used YouTube and spoke to a lot of friends who helped me to study and appropriate all of the best music from many different regions such as Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, the Gulf, Lebanon and Palestine. Each track plays around with single patterns or rhythms that represent those regions. For example, the first track 'The Key to the Exit' is based on an Egyptian rhythm called maqsoum, which is part of the mahraganat genre. But the melting pot of sounds is not entirely defined by that, it’s also about how I, Deena, combine Arabic patterns and those from club music using global and synthesized sounds.

If the idea is for each track to represent a different musical style from specific Arabic regions, how is this exhibited across the album? 

The second track, 'Each Day', is based on a Tunisian fadzani rhythm. Being Tunisian, I wanted to imitate that vocal style as I felt that it was something I could master. 'Six as Oil' and 'Naive' are based on dabke, which is a popular Arabic folklore line dance, 'Complain' is ruboa from Iraq, and 'Violence for Free' is based on a form of Algerian folk music called rai. The closing song, 'Pre-Island', derives from the Gulf region. It was based on a folkloric Kuwaiti song from the ‘60s called the 'Music of The Tailors', although the original version is actually much older than that. I downloaded it from YouTube and loved the groove and melody so much that I chopped it up, studied it and created a loop.

What techniques did you use to re-appropriate the samples you’d discovered?

Once I found the samples, I would basically put them in Ableton’s Arrangement View so I could see everything. Then, for example, if I had a sound that represented a dom, or kick, I’d pull the rhythm and study the groove in Sample View. Rather than create a rhythm by ear, I drew the patterns visually using MIDI connected to a drum element on one of my synths, but the process cannot be too abstract because if you take something out of the pattern that you shouldn’t have, it won’t sound right. Again, the process was a bit like architecture – I drew the pattern, did an A/B test to compare it with the original sample, and when the groove felt good I constructed the song out of the modified pattern using EQ to identify where to go tonally. 

Are you reinterpreting rhythms to avoid sample clearance or because it gives you a fundamentally better understanding of various rhythmic structures?

It’s not about clearance or copyright, it’s more to do with my personal motivation to re-appropriate Arabic music. One of the reasons why people are so close to electronic music is because of its sound design capacity, which is not something you can do with a darabuka drum or hand instrument. Once I draw the rhythms, I want to have the further freedom to use sound design to color or make the rhythms sound more futuristic. 

These days, you have fantastic software libraries that have a lot of sample content from all over the world. Is that something you ever considered using? 

That’s not my field. I prefer to move into unknown territory and create sounds that have not been made before. It’s not that those libraries are superficial, they’re often academic, classical and conventional, and a lot of people need to use VSTs to achieve that type of music. For example, the music of Bashar Suleiman is Kurdish/Syrian and proper dabke but it’s made synthetically with VSTs imitating those instruments, and a big chunk of Arabic dance music, especially Egyptian, is also made using computers. It’s rare that I would even use a hardware instrument, but I do have an Elektron Drum machine and a Prophet Rev2 for making basslines.

Taking a track such as the wonderful 'Each Day' – is there a specific narrative behind your vocal performance? 

It’s a dialogue that I came up with. I put myself in the place of bored young Tunisians who feel that their only hope is to go and live in Europe. Having tattoos, being gay or wanting to be an artist is considered super-crazy in Tunisian society, which says that if you don’t obey their rules then you should go to a country where they will accept you. But immigration is not an easy solution, it’s actually really hard. As an artist, a homosexual and an atheist, it was dangerous for me to live in Tunisia. Ultimately, it’s all about how much capacity you have to face living in that culture and I felt that if I wanted to make music as a profession, there was no way that it was going to happen in Tunisia.

Follow Deena Abdelwahed on Bandcamp and Instagram

Photos courtesy of Yassine Meddeb Hamrouni

Text and interview: Danny Turner