‘The feeling of being stuck and speechless, helpless, of not knowing what to do, as people and as artists. It was a constant questioning of the meaning of our work in a moment like this, a constant search for it, and wondering if it exists at all’ (Mai Mai Mai interview with Foxy Digitalis)

‘What does it mean to make music in the midst of a genocide?’  This is the question that Mai Mai Mai asked himself and his Palestinian collaborators throughout the creation of Karakoz.  The Italian musician spent six weeks in Bethlehem and Ramallah during early 2024, working with a cast of Palestinian musicians, such as Maya Al Khaldi, Julmud, Osama Abu Ali, and Karam Feres, some planned, others spontaneous.  This region, the Cremisan Valley, is one of the last remaining rural landscapes in the vicinity of Jerusalem.  Its patchwork of Palestinian owned olive groves and vineyards is under constant threat of annexation and illegal occupation.

Mai Mai Mai’s soundscapes have always sought to use the concept of hauntology – how ethical calls from the past and future demand change in the present – to explore where he grew up in the port city of Crotone in Southern Italy.  On being invited to work with his Palestinian friends, he was determined to explore those same themes in this very different context.  To conjure the ghosts of the Palestinian past, present, and future and to place them at the very heart of the album’s narrative.  Where they would not fade nor disappear but instead gain new life.  His music is rooted in percussion – intricate yet reassuring, mechanical yet limber – and, on Karakoz, it is intertwined with an understated assurance with Middle Eastern chants, traditional wind and string instruments, and a beguiling tapestry of field and archive recordings.  The result is utterly immersive.

The album opens with the striking melancholy of Grief, which weaves together a hauntingly layered mourning chant with sparse, darkly pulsing synths and spartanly metronomic percussion.  It then segues into the almost pastoral reverie of the title track, before things take a more unsettling turn with the elegiac Echoes Of the Harvest, which fuses ominously skeletal chants with plaintive swirls of saxophone.  Side two continues to morph and reformulate itself with the same imperceptible deftness.  From the wailing rubab (lute), syncopated beats, and disembodied spoken word of Old Poem Made Of Sand to the woozily elastic, yarghul (flute) fuelled closer, Wandering Through The Crowded Paths Of Al-Hisba.

Karakoz is a form of shadow theatre originally popularised across the Ottoman Empire, and the album is undoubtedly an entrancing sonic embodiment of this tradition – one that elicits a powerful sense of place, memory, and identity.  And the answer to the original question posed?  As Mai Mai Mai comments in the accompanying booklet, ‘Perhaps, among the waves of Karakoz, you will find the answer, several, or none’.  But, at the very least, it lays down the challenge and gives voice to those that the world is determined not to hear.