Dar Disku’s Debut Album is A Portal Into the Sounds of SWANA Region

SceneNoise

UK-based Bahraini collective Dar Disku has just released their debut full-length project, a self-titled studio album serving as a sonic journey through time and space that explores the diverse sounds of the SWANA region.

Made up of DJ/producer duo Mazen Almaskati and Vish Mhatre, Dar Disku emerged in 2018 on a mission to unearth the forgotten rhythms of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia region, as well as lands beyond. The collective has since been sprinkling a heady cocktail of wistful joy across the UK’s dancefloors with their carefully curated DJ sets, club edits and compelling remixes, and have recently been jet-setting between regional and global festivals including Glastonbury, Lost Village and Love International.

Mixed by Oliver Wright and recorded using analog techniques at UK’s Humm Studio in Bristol, ‘Dar Disku’ is a culmination of the duo’s extensive years of researching, listening and experimenting, offering a portal into their world beyond the dancefloor. The album, released under Soundway Records, sonically captures what time travelling with Dar Disku’s influences would feel like, and the cosmic emotions of cinematic scores through a meticulous analog approach to live recordings.

“The album came organically through many years of exploring different genres and cultures from the SWANA region, starting with a curiosity to understand the history and craft of the music we’ve long been studying. The end result is a tour of a few of the region’s many soundscapes,” Mazen Almastaki tells SceneNoise.

Although the eight-track record draws directly from the same breath of Dar Disku’s early edits of Middle Eastern music, its sound is unmistakably rooted in the duo’s current influences, encompassing elements from Egyptian folk, Turkish psychedelia and Algerian rai to Sudanese funk, Ethiopian jazz and Khaleeji disco. It’s something that is comfortingly nostalgic and yet refreshingly new. “During the writing process, I found myself naturally leaning away from electronic music and going back to my roots as an instrumentalist. I listened to a lot of cinematic music, afrobeat, experimental and Disco, from artists like Elias Rahbani, Bappi Lahiri, Tony Allen, Cheb Nasro, Marlena Shaw, Dalton and Asha Puthli,” Vish Mhatre tells SceneNoise.

“Some tracks started with Vish and I jamming in a rehearsal space and experimenting with syncopated patterns and grooves. Others came from exploring a certain instrument, like the oud or pianet, which led us to a really fun afro funk/jazz direction,” Almaskati adds.

The album features an extensive list of collaborations with a slew of regional artists, including Bahraini selector Flanah, Tunisian musician Aymen Attia, Turkish star Billur Battal, Indian-American singer-songwriter and producer Asha Puthli, and Algerian singer Yacine Elkhaldi.

‘Dbyali’, the track featuring Yacine Elkhaldi, was released earlier this year as the first single and preview of the album. The track has been traversing prestigious dance floors in venues and festivals across the globe from Croatia and Bahrain to Rajasthan and London.

“The album’s sound probably locked into place after we finished ‘Dbayli’, which captured the authenticity of the inspirations that came before it whilst also being strikingly out of time, place and genre. It was the effect that we desired while making this album,” Almaskati says. “Dbyali was the first song recorded during the album writing process, which was inspired by our desire to create a track for the smoky discotheques of the SWANA region to play in our club sets. Demos were exchanged via WhatsApp between Bristol and Algeria for almost one month before the track was finalised.”