SECRET PLANET // STATE COLLEGE

EL KHAT (BERLIN GERMANY)
W/ BODY OF RESEARCH

SIDNEY FRIEDMAN PARK
241 S FRASIER STREET
6:00PM
FREE(10$ SUGGESTED DONATION)
*IN THE CASE OF RAIN // LOCATION WILL BE AT OUR PARTNERS, SCHLOW LIBRARY'S, COMMUNITY SPACE

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Gorinto x 3 Dots Present Secret Planet: International Sounds in Rural Spaces will establish a landmark series of diverse global music performances in rural Central PA, connecting a decentralized consortium of curators, musicians, and producers presenting international performances across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.

El Khat is a homemade junkyard band led by multi-instrumentalist Eyal El Wahab. Named for the drug used so widely chewed across the Arab Peninsula, The band brings original compositions inspired by the music of the golden age in Aden, Yemen

El Wahab plays many instruments, like the dli and the Kearat that he constructed himself. It's something he started doing several years ago, using his skills to make music from the items people discard. A child of the Yemeni diaspora who's grown up in Tel Aviv Jaffa, Israel, it's a practice that harks back to the family homeland, where even rubbish can have become an instrument.

‍El Wahab has always been a man of invention. He talked his way into the Jerusalem Andalusian Orchestra as a cellist, self-taught from busking and unable to read music, learning the repertoire by ear as he went along, and picking up music theory. It gave him a strong foundation, but his world changed when he was given 'Qat, Coffee & Qambus: Raw 45s from Yemen' an LP of Yemeni traditional music from the 1960s. It came as an epiphany. He quit the orchestra, began building instruments and put together El Khat.

El Khat is celebrating the release of their new album “mute” on Glitterbeat Records.

Mute is an album that explores distance, speech – and the lack of it. It’s a series of musings on people, places – and leaving.

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.

“These songs are about emigrating, leaving someone or somewhere. I don’t think I’ve stayed in any one place for more than a year. For us Arab Jews whose families were forced to leave Yemen, it really began with that big move and our families’ arrival in Israel, a land with a constant muting of the ‘other’.”

Mute, he feels, is “a big and meaningful record.” It’s a story of endings and new beginnings. “But that’s true of all our albums” el Wahab insists. “They’re about relationships and the struggle to see two sides as a whole and not something that ends with muting and conflict. The songs here are about old loves, country, family. They are about feelings and identity.” And all of that inevitably brings up many questions. As he sings on “La Wala”: “Why can’t you never enjoy the moment you’re in/ And always says goodbye/ Why? Why?”