Stellar energy in today’s unique dance music. There may be many others, better known or more celebrated, but DJ Haram has a well-deserved cult following. From fiery solo performances to seismic collaborations with Moor Mother and Armand Hammer, she continues to create a strange corpse in the collective, but also in the different personas that inhabit her. A staunch American of Middle Eastern descent, her cultural genetics are inseparable from her musical production and alchemy, which she displays like few others. Aware of the creative and identity traps that this lineage brings, artistic honesty is her greatest asset. Uncompromising, the physical manipulation and digital processing of rhythms as disparate as echoes of hip hop, footwork, or the hypnotic percussion of ancient times open unlikely portals. What emerges is a proudly hybrid and bastardized electronic sound, globalizing but not globalized—in a continuous space-time.
Aware of the learning and community experience that shaped her, it is in the wastelands of the rawest beats that she has taken much of her work in recent years. Queen of an inimitable freestyle, she is not afraid to use atonality to extract the abrasive nature she often cultivates, nor to use a microphone to add poetry or rebellion to a musical selection that is simultaneously dystopian, feverish, and even sensual. On the decks, she materializes a personal futuristic architecture of sonic distillation and electro-acoustic hallucinations into genuine bangers. Or as she herself once confessed in an interview during another visit to Lisbon: “I prefer people to be impressed by my sounds and stories rather than my mixing desk.”
Beside Myself now comes to us as a sphinx-like, powerful, and essential document. After all, a solo debut album had been in the works for a long time, following an extensive and scattered list of singles, EPs, and joint ventures. A sonic treatise on resistance today and always, in an immersive and ecstatic listening experience. A particularly relevant and inspiring return to scare away spirits in this historic—and troubled—timeline in which we find ourselves.