Maryam Saleh habitually pushes the boundaries of Arabic music. A luminary of Egypt’s alternative music scene, she delivers a savvy mix of old and new, infusing shaabi and folk styles with innovative techniques and fearless personality. Once described as a “musical supernova” by Scene Noise, Saleh is a singer, composer, actor, and poet. As the teenage frontwoman of the band Gawaz Safar in the early 2000s, she revived the decades-old protest songs of folk legend Sheikh Imam for a younger audience. She broke new creative ground with the dizzying electro beats and sarcastic poetry of 2015’s Halawella, a critically-acclaimed album she recorded with Soap Kills’ Zeid Hamdan. In 2017, she boosted her profile even further across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe with Lekhfa, an opus of haunting lyricism and transcendent psychedelia made in collaboration with musicians Tamer Abu Ghazaleh and Maurice Louca and poet Mido Zoheir. Since the late 2000s, she has also taken on memorable roles in TV, theatre, and film—including Ibrahim El-Batout’s Ein Shams (2008) and Tamer El Said’s In the Last Days of the City (2016). 

One of the most gifted, prolific and adventurous figures on Egypt's thriving experimental arts scene, Louca has in recent years garnered a global reputation through solo albums and an expanding, evolving lineup of genre-defying collaborations.

Maurice Louca, an Egyptian musician and Composer who recently released his fourth studio album Saet El Hazz (Northern Spy/Sub Rosa, 2021) and myriad other releases for bands and collaboration he is part of including the Dwarfs of East Agouza (with Alan Bishop & Sam Shalabi), Karkhana and Lekhfa (with Maryam Saleh & Tamer Abu Ghazaleh). Over the past decade he has toured extensively in North America, Europe, North Africa and the Arab world, as well as collaborated across different art forms, composing for dance, visual art and theatre.

Whether on arrangement duties or as a composer, producer, sessionist and multi-instrumentalist, Nancy Mounir has tacitly assured her presence as a prolific figure in Egypt’s independent and alternative music scene. In her youth as an Alexandrian musician, Mounir co-founded the metal band Massive Scar Era, with whom she continues to occasionally perform and record. 

Born and raised in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, today Mounir works and lives in Cairo. As an arranger and co-producer, she most notably worked on Dina El Wedidi’s debut album featuring Grammy award winner Gilberto Gil and the iconic Mazaher Ensemble. As a composer and sound designer, she is frequently found working in film and theatre, often with Egyptian theatre director Laila Soliman and most recently with celebrated Egyptian film director Khairy Beshara on his upcoming film, featuring fellow Cairene musician Nadah El Shazly as an actor. 

Nancy Mounir’s upcoming work and debut solo record Nozhet El Nofous (Arabic for promenade of the souls) has been six years in the making and premiered in its video form at the 2021 Jazzfest Berlin and in October 2021 as an immersive audiovisual performance at the iconic Institute of Arabic Music in Cairo, ahead of its release as a full length album in 2022.

Nadah el Shazly is a producer, vocalist and sound artist from Cairo, Egypt. Her debut album “Ahwar” radically reinvents the popular music of her homeland from the early 19th century and explores new sonic and harmonic frontiers. Using voice, field recordings and instruments, she creates haunting sound pieces and songforms that hijack the perception of time with their complex layers and dynamic structure.

Backing up her release with extensive worldwide touring through a solo set and a four-piece band, El Shazly has been featured in local and international festivals including Irtijal, Le Guess Who?, REWIRE, Best Kept Secret, Nusasonic, Marfa Myths, amongst others.

She continues to compose for film and visual art and has been featured on compilations including Nashazphone’s This is Cairo Not the Screamers and C.A.N.V.A.S.’ s Apocope. Most recently El Shazly curated the Egyptian Leather Pavillion for Nyege Nyege Festival 2020.

Musician, composer and one of the most revered figures for today’s younger generation of experimental and alternative Arabic music scenes, Kamilya Jubran (text, oud & vocals), collaborates with long standing musical partner, composer, accomplished trumpet player and seasoned electronic musician Werner Hasler (trumpet & electronics).

In Wa (Arabic for and), their third album together as a duo, Kamilya Jubran and Werner Hasler continue to interrogate their listening and their expression, their research and their desires, to unravel a musical universe of possibilities; “a unison of timbres, cultures complementing, the complicity of verses, and modes and languages confronting each other” in the duo’s own way of communicating respective origins and contemporaneity. Lyrical, within a sound full of contrast and ornamentation, they pursue an expansion of their repertoire with imaginative interpretation and improvisation.

Lekhfa is the creation of Maryam Saleh, Maurice Louca and Tamer Abu Ghazaleh, three 

musicians who came of age in 1990s Cairo. Decades later the three musicians - who have each blazed their different paths through the alternative Arabic music scene with solo albums and acclaimed collaborations - agreed to meet at a seaside cabin in Alexandria to create and record a new album.

With Lekhfa this charismatic trio have given birth to an off-kilter album of sonic grit and beauty - the perfect setting for the dystopian poems of the late Mido Zoheir, the band’s ‘fourth member’ and one of the most talented Egyptian poets of his generation.