El Khat

media release: Auricle, the experimental sound and music series at Arts + Literature Laboratory, presents El Khat on Sunday, November 5, 2023, at 7:00pm. Advance tickets are $20 ($15 for students and ALL members) or $25 at the door for everyone. 

El Khat - a homemade junkyard band led by multi-instrumentalist Eyal El Wahab. Named for the drug used so widely chewed across the Arab Peninsula, El Khat brings original compositions inspired by the music of the golden age in Aden, Yemen. El Wahab plays many instruments, like the dli and the Kearat that he constructed himself. It's something he started doing several years ago, using his skills to make music from the items people discard. A child of the Yemeni diaspora who's grown up in Tel Aviv Jaffa, Israel, it's a practice that harks back to the family homeland, where even rubbish can have become an instrument.

El Wahab has always been a man of invention. He talked his way into the Jerusalem Andalusian Orchestra as a cellist, self-taught from busking and unable to read music, learning the repertoire by ear as he went along, and picking up music theory. It gave him a strong foundation, but his world changed when he was given Qat, Coffee & Qambus: Raw 45s from Yemen, an LP of Yemeni traditional music from the 1960s. It came as an epiphany. He quit the orchestra, began building instruments and put together El Khat.

Albat Alawi Op.99, El Khat’s new album, released on March 2022 via Glitterbeat Records, celebrates an homage to Faisal Alawi, a popular Yemeni singer who died in 2010, along with an alba, a small tin box that can contain many treasures, while the Op.99 is intended to give the compositions “the same respect as Western classical music.”

"The songs on Albat Alawi Op 99 are [band leader Eyal el Wahab’s] own compositions and he has created a denser, rougher sound to carry them. The result is like a whirlwind in a workshop: a barrage of freaked percussion, whomping bass and choral voices set off by banks of detuned brass.” --Clive Bell, The Wire