Following the release of their excellent new album Mute on Hamburg imprint Glitterbeat, El Khat come to Berlin for a special live concert at Gretchen in Kreuzberg this March.
El Khat’s 3rd album mute belies its title as it careens out of the speakers with a raucous intensity. Formed in the garages and warehouses of Jaffa and now based in Berlin, the group’s ever-expanding vision makes a defiant stand against complacency, conflict and division. Skittering drums and brass, a jagged organ, hypnotic Yemeni melodies and one-of-a-kind DIY percussion and string instruments, all meld together in an infectious, heady soundscape. Sometimes wildly raw, sometimes lush and enveloping. Always uncompromised and adventurous.
Mute. As a noun it means refraining from speech; a device placed over the bridge of a stringed instrument; or something that temporarily turns off sound. As a verb, to mute is to deaden, muffle, or soften sound. Muting is the opposite of openness and communication and for Eyal el Wahab, the man behind El Khat, it’s a vital word, one which he’s chosen very carefully for the title of the band’s third album.
The record began life with the core of El Khat – multi-instrumentalist el Wahab, percussionist Lotan Yaish and organist Yefet Hasan – recording in an isolated village underground shelter. “My state of mind at the time affected the compositions even before I wrote the music,” el Wahab notes, “and the isolated location gave us a chance to make sense of that.” Following those sessions, in the summer of 2023 the group emigrated to Berlin; a far cry from Jaffa, where they’d largely grown up. The move was an expression of the nomadic urge that has been a constant in el Wahab’s life, one that flows directly into his work.
