“We want to break the idea that Western culture is the center of the world”

The great explosion in the port of Beirut in August 2020 was the seed that prompted the emergence of Rust, one of the musical projects that tries to revolutionize the way of making music in Lebanon. No one, least of all its creators, the music producer Hany Manja (35 years old, Damascus) and the singer Petra Hawi (32 years old, Lebanon) imagined that a month after this tragedy, which destroyed 77,000 homes in the Lebanese capital, killed two hundred people and injured 7,000—would consolidate a new style of making Arabic electronic music. “We have learned to create in the midst of the crisis. After the explosion, my band fell apart and I felt the need to discover my voice and my Arabic melody. Before, I only played western music,” says Hawi.

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In just three years, this couple of artists have found their own style, through the fusion of rhythms originating in the Middle East with others such as trip hop or techno. “We produce music like Aramaic, but we transform it with electronic sound and textures.” Rust, they explain, is a word in Farsi —or Persian— that means rust, a name that alludes to their proposal to recover traditional Arabic poems and music “rusty and forgotten by the passage of time,” Hawi says. “The goal is to give them value again through a touch of current affairs,” adds the singer during her visit to Madrid on June 30. The duo presented in the Spanish capital the Iwa Fest, festival of the diversity of Amazigh and Mediterranean culture, which will be held in Melilla on September 29 and 30.

The couple, who move like a fish in water in the Madrid setting of Casa Árabe’s Jardín Secreto, know well what it means to create in the midst of a crisis. They have done so in a country that ranks third in the world in terms of highest inflation rates, after Venezuela and Sudan; and where their currency, the Lebanese pound, has lost more than 95% of its pre-2021 value. They have done so, too, despite continued power outages. “If making a living from art is hard enough, imagine what it means to make electronic music without electricity,” says Hany Manja. Lebanon currently lives on an average of one to three hours a day of electrical power, according to the latest Human Rights Watch report. “This is the land of uncertainty. If you have electricity, there is no water. If there is water, there is no fuel for the car. Insecurity is also a problem. All of this affects our productivity”, comments this young economist, an artist by conviction.

The synthesizer, the sound of the lute, the voice and the compilation of classical Arabic songs from the beginning of the 20th century are the mainstays of Rust. “We can be Arab without submitting to the idea that we are not good enough in a global context. There is a tendency to make western music because it is considered to be better. We want to break the idea that Western culture is the center of the world. There is no center. All identities are valuable”, clarifies Manja.

And it has not been easy. Managing his voice, as well as mastering the instruments, have been his main challenges. For Petra Hawi, for example, trying to recover her Arabic voice is still a daily job. She learned Western singing from the age of nine and has perfected her vocal technique at the Lebanese Higher Conservatory of Music, but it wasn’t until college that she learned Arabic singing. “Arabic maqams or melodies are different from Western melodies. The maqam scale has more notes and a much wider and more flexible range of sounds. Here improvisation is fundamental, ”she explains. Hawi confesses that she continues to receive private lessons due to the difficulty in finding specialized academies for this type of music. “It’s very difficult and you can’t find them anywhere. So you have to push yourself, learn it, practice it and listen to traditional music.”

For Hany Manja, this difference between Western and Arab musical training has been even more evident. “If we see our culture start to fade into the memory of our parents or grandparents, you feel it even more when producing music with synthesizers set to Western notes and melodies.” Manja says that imitating sounds of common instruments from Arab culture on the synthesizer is very difficult. “You run the risk of sounding exotic,” she stresses. That’s why, he explains, he has spent a lot of time finding software that changes the pitch of each note, so that the sound is as faithful as possible to the Arabic scale.

The artistic couple is clear about it, giving a touch of today to the traditional brings with it detractors. “Some see it as disrespectful, but others see it as something new and refreshing. In the end it is impossible to create something that everyone likes. The truth is that we try to produce new music using the tradition, which is very rich and deep, and we have to learn from it. But we would like to express it in our own way”, concludes Petra Hawi.

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