Sampling in electronic music opened the door for artists to add virtually anything to their sonic palette – and oriental touches were no exception. With the rise of the internet, these mashups became more accessible and widespread. Musicians, both Western and Eastern, suddenly had access to sonic territories that hadn’t yet been fully explored. But these explorations often come with ethical tension. Many of the sounds introduced into the scene were made palatable for dance floors, framed as something “unheard” or novel — often just to add an exotic flair. It wasn’t always an organic integration of non-Western elements, but more like a colonial-style “discovery” of outsider art. Non-commercial themes and tracks from the Middle East or Africa were often extracted and stripped from their original contexts, repurposed into consumable fragments tailored to Western audiences across electronic music, hip-hop, and even metal.
But eventually, underground – and often non-commercial – musicians emerged from across the globe, pushing back against this one-sided narrative of music history. They offered a more organic, insider perspective on non-Western musical traditions, challenging the reductive ways these sounds had been framed. This shift coincided with a broader departure, beginning in the early 90s, as many electronic artists and labels began drifting away from the dancefloor, turning instead toward more introspective and sonically ambitious spaces.
DJ Haram emerges from this lineage of artists working to dismantle the fetishisation of global sounds. Based in New York but originally from Jersey, she describes herself as a “multidisciplinary propagandist” – a phrase that captures both her confrontational wit and the layered politics embedded in her practice. Her work resists the reduction of non-Western musical traditions to mere exotic garnish, instead attempting to de-fetishise the gene pool of so-called “world music”, and seeks to deconstruct this ornamental approach by reanimating its materials through cultural memory, embodied knowledge, and sonic intensity.
This approach is evident in her earlier work – particularly in her collaborations with Moor Mother as part of the 700 Bliss duo, where abrasive, politically charged noise-rap meets fractured club sensibilities. The same energy runs through her solo EPs and singles, where she continues to bend genre into confrontational forms. It’s this polemical, uncompromising stance that sets DJ Haram apart from many of her peers – a defiant clarity of vision that underpins Beside Myself, her long-awaited debut. The album doesn’t just stand alone; it weaves itself into a loose, virtual community of dissident artists, many of whom have worked alongside her over the years. From Afro-Caribbean New York-based trumpeter Aquilles Navarro to Palestinian Dakn and Cairo-based DJ El Kontessa.
Take the lead track, ‘Voyeur’, as a case in point: a stark expression of her anti-hedonist ethos. It’s a distressed, claustrophobic composition built around scraping strings and pounding percussion that recall, loosely, the tension of Turkish kemenche and davul. The effect is one of impending crisis – as if some unnamed horror is closing in and there’s neither time nor room for pleasure. That riot grrrl-informed, killjoy, community-conscious, and highly combustible stance has been with her from the start – evident as early as the mid-2010s in her zine Bros Fall Back: Kill The Bro In Yr Head, a manifesto that reads like a scorched-earth call for dismantling internalised patriarchy as much as scene-bound machismo. “If we really want to actualize the spaces we want…”, the zine reads, “we’ll need to burn the bridges behind us.”
So it’s no surprise to hear the voice of Nawal El Saadawi, the pioneering Egyptian feminist, woven into ‘Badass’, preaching against the repressive Middle Eastern household, which she frames as a system that stifles creativity and breeds docility in the young. ‘Remaining’ is perhaps the most personal track: a convergence of Aquiles Navarro’s apocalyptic trumpet, Dakn’s spiraling Arabic verses, and Haram’s voice, which comes across as a desperate whim rather than a structured line. On ‘Lifelike’, where her bandmate Moor Mother reappears, we’re drawn once again into that blend of searing poetry and abrasive texture. “Simulation dismantled,” she intones, her voice drenched in noisy static. Nothing feels alive; everything is estranged, flickering at the edge of collapse. But here, they drift further from their usual hip-hop vocabulary. ‘Fishnets’ is perhaps the closest thing to traditional rap, all pounding sub-bass and piercing hi-hats, as Brooklyn underground producer August Fanon teams up with Bbymutha and Sha Ray for a raw, tightly wound cut.
Then comes ‘Stenography’ where the prolific and razor-sharp duo Armand Hammer (Billy Woods and ELUCID) return to Haram’s orbit. As with their previous collaborations with DJ Haram on Woods’ Golliwog and the duo’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, their dense, allusive poetry folds seamlessly into her jagged, atonal beats, creating something both cerebral and corrosive. ‘IDGAF’ feels like unfamiliar ground for DJ Haram – and perhaps even for guitarist Abdul Hakim Bilal, considering the tone of his previous work. The track’s layers of heavily distorted guitar push Haram out of her usual sonic terrain, edging closer to the scorched atmospheres of Moor Mother’s collaborations with metal acts like Sumac. Yet that metallic presence doesn’t fully embed itself into the album’s core; instead, it hangs at the edges, more a gesture toward abrasion than a structural shift.
If we take the album’s dissident, confrontational tone as its guiding spirit, then ‘Sahel’ featuring El Kontessa, lands right in the bloodstream. Its jungle breakbeats and needle-sharp scratches amplify the record’s restless energy, carrying the same sense of urgency and refusal that runs throughout Beside Myself. With this cutting-edge cohort of collaborators, DJ Haram has delivered a debut worthy of an artist intent on tearing through the clichés that cling to both sound and identity – confronting the systems that colonise, both outwardly and within. And she succeeds, sonically, in drawing lines not just against enemies, but also among allies – refusing easy solidarity, and forcing a reckoning with complicity, comfort, and performance.
