Deena Abdelwahed - Khonnar

November 16, 2018 - InFiné

I first came across Deena Abdelwahed while staying in Oslo last summer and have been following her since. She has been shaking up the European electronic music scene the past two years, sharply questioning it’s one-dimensionality with a sound that is unmistakably built for a dark sweaty dance club and injected with her Tunisian heritage and perspective. And her first full-length album Khonnar (pronounced “Ronnar”), is a triumph. She deconstructs musical tropes deeply rooted in the Western imagination about the East, and they are unmistakably front and center in her work. 

These songs are dark and frustrated, and they reveal cultural stereotypes in music to me as I listen that are uncomfortable to face—that I listen to a certain progression of notes and immediately picture a cartoon snake charmer from moments in my childhood, a one-dimensional caricature that distills the diversity of an entire geographic region into one image. But, Abdelwahed is patiently aggressive, and she addresses the offense while enveloping me in a sound that is experimental and exciting, a new vision for what reality actually is. And what better place than the dance floor to cultivate a new cultural vision? There is unharnessed power in the vulnerability there. 

Abdelwahed is playful, loose, authentic and emotional in the way she composes and uses her instrumental arsenal. There are parts on ‘5/5’ where everything sounds completely improvised, an unexpected quality in a genre that completely emphasizes production and one that is extremely challenging to achieve. And when listening to ‘Al Hobb Al Mouharreb,’ I melt. The contrast between the dark techno textures and the vocal samples she chooses has a cavernous effect introduced by the first track ‘Saratan’ and carried throughout. Melodrama with a loose narrative progression throughout the album creates an album as an artwork as a whole. There is specificity to the track order (something I no longer take for granted in today’s musical climate). Khonnar is a carefully-curated rallying cry for transformation. 

Like all musical styles that came before it, electronic dance music takes from other cultures, absorbing them and regurgitating them. Producers are always looking for the next big thing, the next big influence to sample that will set them apart from the crowd, and are thus more sensitive to the implications of that influence. To sample is to take and react. It is an act of privilege. But the amalgamation that results is how culture grows. In an ideal society, all parties have the privilege to take from each other and create great things. That is the goal we actually want for the future—cultural growth and development that is pure, where we all learn from each other on level ground rather than exploit each other for resources. Humans are better than that, at least we are in our perception of our humanity. It will be centuries before we are better in reality, in the praxis of our thoughts. For this moment, though, I am thankful for artists like Deena Abdelwahed. We need to be reminded in every aspect of our lives, from the media we consume to the soap we use to wash our bodies, just what it is we are striving for. ☔