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Muqata'a

Swerving rhythms punctuated with percussive digital fragments are contrasted against crackling samples of Arabic symphonies. The voice of a man singing is digitally stretched into a sustained note until finally nearly becoming a melody before the track abruptly ends. An old tape-saturated Palestinian song shatters into short loops scattered across slow, fractured rhythms with wide undulating bass tones, drifting from low to lower frequencies.

Muqata’a was just 11 years old when he discovered he could produce music using the family computer at his home in Ramallah. He was already studying guitar and oud, but the computer offered newfound agency as he made his way online – uploading and sharing tracks, digging through music blogs, and connecting with an online community. But for Muqata’a, growing up in Palestine meant life offline was subject to struggles not experienced by his international online peers. In the early 2000s the Israeli-occupied West Bank was subjected to strict curfews. As he and his family were forced inside their home, sometimes for several consecutive days, music, specifically hip-hop, became the vehicle through which Muqata’a could reflect on his experience, connect with others living through it, and speak to what was going on to the outside world.

The hip-hop scene was practically non-existent in the West Bank when he performed his first show at 17. Years of cultural suppression meant there were no legitimate music venues and little will to organize events, so he and his peers did it themselves. His first rap group, Ramallah Underground, gave voice to the Palestinian experience and led a new era of Palestinian hip hop, reaching international attention and working with the renowned Kronos Quartet before disbanding in 2009. Despite their success, constant adaptation and flexibility were utterly necessary as events could be shut down without warning. At some point, Muqata’a picked up the habit of working with lightweight, portable music equipment in case he needed to pack up and leave at a moment’s notice – a habit he maintains today.

In the years since, Muqata’a has turned his attention to producing, recently releasing his most recent fifth solo album, Kamil Manqus كَامِل مَنْقوص. Vibrant, distinctive samples are defining features of Muqata’a’s tracks, sourced from records and tapes of traditional Palestinian music and field recordings of daily life in Ramallah. Years of cultural suppression mean that today, records and tapes of traditional Palestinian music are exceedingly rare within Palestine and for Muqata’a, incorporating these sounds is a way to keep his heritage alive, to preserve the past but also to make it vital, to insist that these sounds and traditions continue to ring in the ears of present and future generations.

Since arriving in Berlin and settling into his DAAD fellowship, he has time and a sense of stability that his life back home doesn’t typically allow. When asked if he feels far away from his community, he replies, “I feel closer to them than ever. Before, I was so focused on my own productions because that’s what I had time for. Now I can finally work with all these artists back home. I speak with them all the time.”

Text: Reece Cox