We work with El Khat for Spain and Portugal and some specific events in other countries.
For bookings in other countries, contact with Swamp Booking.
El Khat is named after the drug that is widely chewed in the Middle East and is especially prevalent in Yemen. The band was created in 2018 and is led by Eyal El Wahab, a musician of Yemeni background with a rather unique musical career. He made his way into the Andalusian Orchestra in Jerusalem as a cellist, having taught himself while playing in the street, not knowing how to read music, learning the repertoire by ear as he went along and learning music theory in the meantime. This gave him a solid foundation, but his world changed when he was given “Qat, Coffee & Qambus: Raw 45s from Yemen”, an LP of traditional Yemeni music from the 1960s. It was like an epiphany. He left the orchestra, started building instruments and set up El Khat.
El Wahab plays many of the instruments on his records, such as the dli and kearat, which he built himself. He is a skilled cabinetmaker who uses his skills to make music out of objects that people throw away. The son of the Yemeni diaspora, it is a practice that goes back to his family’s homeland, where even rubbish can be turned into an instrument. “There, people just play with a tin can,” he says. “Here, people throw things away, treasures or junk, and I transform it”.
Eyal el Wahab brings a funky, psychedelic reimagining to the traditional Yemeni songs that electrified him when he first heard them. With El Khat he has released two albums: Saadia Jefferson (Batov Records, 2019) and Albat Alawi Op.99 (Glitterbeat, 2022) an album almost entirely filled with his own compositions, up close and personal, constantly looking back to his family’s homeland in the Arabian Peninsula.
It’s been said about El Khat:
“Brilliant” Gilles Peterson
“Joyously mixing authentically Arabic musical tropes with ethnomusicological forgeries” Uncut 8/10
“This sounds like a Middle Eastern Manu Chao” Songlines ★★★★
“The sound is a glorious, ecstatic clatter” Financial Times ★★★★
“Yemeni band El Khat deconstruct traditional folk songs into a gritty, guitar-fuelled collection of incisive statements” The Guardian
“This is crazy music indeed, but crazy with a kind of wayward vitality, a sound universe all of its own…full of strange and wonderful beauty” The Arts Desk ★★★★
“A ramshackle interrogation of Yemeni funk and pop sources filtered through invented and junk-made instruments, and played by a poly-glot group with roots in Iraq, Poland and Morocco” Wire Magazine
” To hear updated versions of tracks I was lucky enough to find in Sana’a, the country’s capital takes me back to a poignant time of musical education and discovery, as well as serving as a stark reminder of the current suffering of the Yemeni people caught in the crossfire of geopolitical conflict.” Chris Menist, NTS DJ and compiler of Dust to Digital’s ‘Qat, Coffee & Qambus: Raw 45s from Yemen
