For Yazan Sarayrah, musical identity has never been particularly easy to reduce to a genre, a place or even a single tradition. His route into electronic music has taken in the sounds of his childhood in Jordan, years spent playing in bands, Scandinavian folk and classical music, Cuban rhythms, reggae, metal and musical traditions stretching from North Africa to India and Anatolia.
Those seemingly distant influences come together on IRTH-TRONIC, a project that sees Sarayrah looking more deliberately towards his own history, exploring family, heritage and the sounds he grew up around through the possibilities of contemporary electronic production.
In the process, he found himself reconsidering musical ideas that had been present long before he thought about them consciously.
“Working on IRTH-TRONIC made me feel like I was coming home in a way” he says. “It brought me closer to my roots, made me re-experience sounds I had taken for granted with a fresh mentality. Things that had always felt familiar started to reveal different layers once I began looking at them as a musician and consciously engaging with them. It made me appreciate where some of these sounds, ideas and ways of making music came from, and how deeply they were already part of me without me necessarily noticing it.”
Sarayrah’s earliest memories of music have little to do with studios or electronic production. Instead, they begin at home, where music existed as part of everyday family life.
“Growing up, my earliest musical memories come from family, my brothers playing oud and tabla at family gatherings, my grandmother singing random Hjeni poem lines while doing house chores. Those were probably my first real music memories that took shape.”
What followed was considerably less linear. As a teenager he found metal, before moving through reggae, Indian bhajans, North African Rai, Tuareg and Amazigh music, Cuban music and Anatolian saz. Just as importantly, much of that education came through playing rather than simply listening.
“I’ve also experienced music through very different communities. I volunteered running a music project at Swedish youth centres for sometime, and later studied Scandinavian Aesthetic Studies at the University of Gothenburg, which opened me up to Scandinavian classical and folk music. Alongside all this, I played in different bands, drums in rock, guitar in metal and Arabic bands, saz with an Arabic band, bass in a Cuban band, and percussion in a reggae band, each one pulling me into a different way of listening and playing.”
“All of my experience has shaped how I listen, play, and approach music today.”
Playing bass in a Cuban band proved particularly significant, introducing him to an understanding of rhythm quite removed from the Arabic traditions he already knew. At the same time, returning to the music of his childhood has allowed him to recognise complexities that once felt instinctive.
“There are a lot of things, but one I can think of now would be Khaleeji and Yemeni grooves. The draggy nature of some of these grooves was something I could feel, translate and play without thinking much about it. As I became more interested in rhythm and music in general, I started to appreciate how distinctive that feeling is and how much character and attitude it gives to all other accompanying instruments as well. It’s something I hear very differently now than I did when I was younger.”
Rather than trying to reconcile those different strands into a neat list of influences, Sarayrah seems more interested in what happens when they are allowed to coexist.
“So my influences sit quite far apart from each other, and I don’t think I can rank them. Some came from family, some from places I lived, some I went looking for, and some just came from being in a band at the right time. All of it shaped how I listen, play, and approach music today.”
If Sarayrah’s background has shaped what he hears, production has changed how he hears it. He talks about music spatially, imagining not simply the individual sounds within a piece but the environment they collectively create.
“I think what I notice and automatically imagine now is space, how much each element in a track occupies, how big or cozy the overall space that track lives in is, how crowded and festive it feels, or how quiet and purposeful. I can almost imagine what that room looks like.”
That attention to context runs through his production process. Despite the almost limitless choices available inside modern software, his approach to IRTH-TRONIC involved gradually establishing restrictions: recurring percussion sounds, particular synth families, vocal timbres and acoustic instruments, alongside sounds carried forward from his previous album.
“I also have some sounds that I developed through my first album which have become part of my sonic identity and are now part of my musical vocabulary.”
The process begins expansively before moving in the opposite direction. Sarayrah initially allows ideas to accumulate, then starts stripping them back once the identity of the track becomes clearer.
“I first let myself drop everything I want to hear into a track, which helps me get a hint of where we’re going and determines its lifespan. It’s almost like meeting the track for the first time, taking the idea I’ve been hearing in my head and being introduced to it in reality. Once I have the full picture in front of me, I can start removing, trimming and changing things until I arrive at something that feels like a true representation of the idea I first heard in my head.”
“Having boundaries helps me stay focused on the original idea and makes the choices I do make feel more intentional and cohesive.”
Those limitations ultimately become part of what ties the album together.
“So I don’t let myself drift toward every exciting option the software presents me with. Having those boundaries helps me stay focused on the original idea and makes the choices I do make feel more intentional and cohesive.”
For all the research behind IRTH-TRONIC, Sarayrah’s reference points continue to reach well beyond electronic music. Asked which musician he would choose to spend a day in the studio with, he lands on Bob Marley — less because of a particular production technique than the relationship between the person and the work.
“A lot pop into my mind, but I’d go with Bob Marley. What interests me most is the integrity between his personal beliefs, his way of being, and what he translated into music. That connection is something I try to push myself towards in my own work as well, and I’m always looking for ways to make it deeper and more honest.”
It is an idea that perhaps explains why Sarayrah is drawn towards concepts in his own records. For him, making an album is an opportunity to investigate something over time, rather than simply assembling a collection of tracks.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for music without an overarching idea. Sarayrah finds that freedom elsewhere, particularly through playing with other musicians. He is also a guitarist in Jordanian band Autostrad, whose movement between genres gives him an outlet for a more immediate kind of creativity.
“I think the “whatever excites me” part can exist more naturally for me through jamming and with other musicians, where ideas don’t necessarily need to be documented or developed into finished pieces. Sometimes it’s just about being in a room with other musicians and seeing where the energy takes you.”
His listening remains similarly unconcerned with consistency. Meshuggah’s Catch 33 sits among the records he loves despite having little obvious connection to his own output.
“I think most of what i listen to makes no sense to what i do, My listening has always been so scattered. But maybe I’d go with Meshuggah’s Catch 33. It probably makes very little sense and comes from a completely different genre than the music I make myself but here’s something about that album that I find very core-tickling.”
“Sometimes it’s just about being in a room with other musicians and seeing where the energy takes you.”
For his solo work, however, research and instinct don’t appear to be opposing forces. IRTH-TRONIC has given Sarayrah a framework through which to look more closely at sounds that have surrounded him for much of his life, while his work with other musicians provides somewhere for ideas to exist without necessarily needing to become anything more.
“Within my own project, though, I enjoy researching a theme and seeing where it takes me as a body of work. So I don’t necessarily feel a need to make something without a concept.
I’m just very thankful to be lucky enough to have access to both of these worlds within what I do as an artist.”
IRTH-TRONIC is out now