Charif Megarbane - In the Name of Urgency

Rhythm is the relationship between what you believe and what you believed before

(David Foster Wallace)

Charif Megarbane, a Lebanese artist with a prolific and refined body of work, takes us by the hand through the story of his career, his latest album, “Hawalat”, and how everything branches out under the sign of urgency.

You were born and raised in Lebanon in the late 80s: has music always been part of your life?

My parents always listened to a lot of music, mostly jazz, even though they weren't musicians themselves. They always encouraged me in that direction, and I started playing guitar as a kid – it was immediately one of my greatest passions. When I was about 12 they gave me a Four Track Machine, and that's where I discovered I could layer different instruments. That's when I realized I could produce tracks on my own in my room: that's where my process of building, and later producing, began.

In fact you do everything yourself: composition, performance and production.

Yes, so much so that I set up a label called Hisstology, where I've put all the albums I've produced, all my projects – there are more than a hundred of them. And that eventually led me to meet Jannis Stürtz of Habibi Funk, the Berlin label with which I released “Marzipan”, “Hamra” and now “Hawalat”.

You play a lot of different genres, from electronic music to krautrock to surf rock, just to name a few, often under different names. With Habibi, though, you record under your own name – why is that?

The different productions are partly connected. Hisstology is home to most of the albums I've released online. It's a kind of musical laboratory: the idea was to look for new sounds and explore them, often using different names, as if someone else were playing. That allowed me to explore and experiment with different kinds of music. Until, one day, Habibi Funk convinced me to make music under my own name. So I changed direction and tried to reproduce many styles within a single album, rather than many albums of a single style, obviously trying to do it all in a coherent way.

And how do you decide which style to explore?

What drives me is simply curiosity, the search for a challenge. In Italy people say “ludico”, right? That's always somewhat the idea – the search for experimentation, mainly to explore, to learn. I approach this search in a very playful way.

Let's move on to the album “Hamra Red”: there are some very different titles like “Stella Marina”, “Pesce Rosso” and then “Hamra”, which is actually a neighborhood in Beirut, right?

Hamra is indeed a neighborhood in Beirut, and at the same time it means “red” in Lebanese. With Habibi Funk our idea was to make limited editions of the album, and we chose a theme to connect them all: primary colors. So all the titles refer to objects, animals, places that, in the case of this album, evoke the color red, and that are somehow connected to the geography of Lebanon.

On that note, do you think places influence the music you've made at different points in your life?

I really think so, mostly from a logistical point of view – in particular the light, access to instruments, the recording studio. It can also affect inspiration, influencing the vibe, but not necessarily from a stylistic point of view, in the sense that if I went to Detroit, I wouldn't necessarily feel I had to produce a hip-hop album – I could just as easily produce a calypso album, if that makes sense. Rather than style, I'd tie it to the logistics of the place; it's a less conscious process, though the light of a place certainly plays a fundamental role.

Your music partly seems to nod to Italian crime films of the 70s–80s, is that just my impression, or is there really a connection?

Absolutely, yes! My idol is Ennio Morricone, but also the whole Italian and French heritage of film music from the 60s to the 80s. Composers like Piccioni, Alessandroni, Nicolai fascinate me enormously, I admire them and their music inspires me constantly. I listen to them and I always discover something new. Film music definitely influences me hugely, because it's extremely creative, it has the ability to paint an image and an action, all without words; it can be funky or grim or moody, and that's incredible.

So, more broadly, would you say soundtracks are part of your creative identity?

Yes, and I think there's a genre in its own right that should be recognised, namely car-chase music, both from the point of view of the pursuers and of the pursued. The ability to convey a sense of tension and pressure through mood, tempo, arrangements is exactly what you see in every film of that kind, and it's a sublime creative exercise. Especially because I think any musical style could pull it off, from funk to reggae, yet it represents a feeling all its own.

Are there Italian artists you feel a creative kinship with?

Yes, there are two Italian artists, from Naples, whom I admire enormously and with whom I collaborated on the production of my latest album "Hawalat" (out on April 11), who by now are friends: Dario Bassolino, who played and helped produce several tracks, and LNDFK, who lent her magnificent voice. We worked together in wonderful harmony, so we'll probably try to make an album together this year. We met a year ago, because Dario worked with Jakarta Records and we spent a week together in the studio, and besides being a wonderful person and a very talented artist, I think he reveals an undeniable affinity between the vibe of Naples and that of Beirut. Even musically, there's a festive side, and aesthetically, in the arrangements there are similarities with Lebanese albums from the 70s — Ziad Rahbani comes to mind, for instance, with disco sounds and sophisticated jazz arrangements.

That's an interesting similarity between 70s Beirut music and Naples.

Yes, I think you could write a thesis on how alike the two cities are.

Let's talk about the album "Hawalat", out in a few weeks — how did you conceive it?

There are some fundamental themes running through the album. The title, "Hawalat", refers to informal money-transfer systems that exist in Lebanon, through which people can send money to their loved ones in countries like Libya, Somalia or Yemen. There aren't proper banks or authorised transfer systems there; instead, private, informal systems are used, based entirely on trust. That's how, in some countries, the diaspora helps the loved ones left behind. "Hawalat" literally means "transfer" in Arabic. I wanted to talk about the transfer of people themselves, about exile, but at the same time about human networks based purely on trust.

Just as "Marzipan" and "Hamra" were albums inspired by central Lebanon, with "Hawalat" I felt the need to talk about the theme of flows of people, who leave their country and their loved ones, in a world where even for the most privileged, choosing to leave one's country has become extremely common.

And at the same time, this idea of networking, of collaboration between people, is fully reflected in the album. It's the first record released under my own name where I invited several artists, from different backgrounds, to play together. As I was saying, some wonderful collaborations came out of it, with Dario Bassolino on keyboards, LNDFK on vocals, Sven Wunder who arranged one track. It's as if I'd opened the doors.

You let people in.

Yes, exactly.

Do you feel, if you'll forgive the term, in exile?

I'm part of a privileged class, because I can go home and leave again freely, but unfortunately, at least in part, the situation in Lebanon is very fragile. I can travel and come back, I'm one of the lucky ones, exactly, but the notion of exile is always very present, I grew up there and my family is there.

The first track released from the album was “Hanadi”, what does it represent?

“Hanadi” is an Arabic female name. It's a simple track, I think I wrote and recorded it in just a few hours, it's inspired by Somali music and partly by Ethiopian music too. I lived in Somalia for a period of my life and I find the music I got to know there incredible. Working with Samra, who has Somali roots, it was immediately easy to sync up on the kind of melody we were trying to evoke. In particular, I wanted the first track to be simple, innocent, something that brought everything back to basics. Whereas the second track released, “Dreams Of An Insomniac”, is more cinematic, more complex, with more arrangements. It was produced together with Sahra and Dana McWayne, who added saxophone that nods to an Ethiopian melodic range.

The idea of collectivity is important to you in music-making too, isn't it?

Yes, absolutely, artists from different backgrounds took part, people who love music and try to pay tribute to the sounds of different places and countries. Usually I do things quite spontaneously, and quickly, I try to capture the moment and the unique quality that moment carries with it, whether that's inspiration or the friends around me, ready to take part. For example, the Cosmic Analogue Ensemble album was more focused on a single theme, a central emotion; the theme was absence, memories and adapting to memory, and it was all developed using the same instruments. Whereas here, with “Hawalat”, I tried to touch on several styles within the same album, in keeping with the theme, which is precisely the diaspora, all while trying to create a musical coherence so the album wouldn't feel fragmented. I hope I balanced it well, in short.

And who does “Hanadi” pay tribute to?

“Hanadi” is a tribute to a specific type of Somali music. Mine is an attempt to pay tribute to that style, certainly not to all Somali music, and to do so by creating a connection, as if I wanted to weave a web between various musical genres, making them speak to each other, trying to do it in a way that's respectful of the culture and musically coherent.

And now you're about to leave for your European tour.

Yes, I'm about to leave on a co-headlining tour with Rogér Fakhr, a Lebanese artist with an incredible story. He belongs to my parents' generation, he was twenty during the civil war, in the mid-70s, and was part of a music scene that was bursting with energy and talented artists. Back then Rogér recorded an album on cassette in just a few hours, which he distributed to very few people, mostly acquaintances, after which he moved to San Francisco, where he lived for forty years and changed careers. Then a few years ago it happened that Habibi Funk got hold of this cassette and offered to reissue it, and it was a success. Indeed, the album is magnificent. After that success, Jannis from Habibi Funk managed to convince Rogér to go back to playing live, after all those years. So we met up to play some shows together. I normally play live with two musicians, the group is called Papier Maché, and together with them and Roger we did two shows in London, and it was extremely moving. After all those years away from the scene, he found himself in front of an audience singing along to his songs, and it was moving. A bit like in the documentary “Looking For Sugarman”, he seemed to have given up on the dream of music, but things turned out differently. The connection between us was incredible, so we decided to do it again with a co-headliner tour that will start now and cover Central and Northern Europe. We're also hoping to make it back to the Mediterranean as soon as possible, probably towards the end of the year.

And, in your opinion, where does this connection between you come from?

It's strange, because we belong to different generations and I've recorded hundreds of records while he made just one album, before moving on to other things in life. And yet we're connected by speed, by the fact that we both recorded in just a few hours, instinctively, in one go. I think that, more than anything, this sense of urgency, the urgency to create, bonded us enormously.

Thank you, Charif,

Thank you.

(April 6, 2025)

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