There’s a revealing moment in Yazan Sarayrah’s account of making IRTH-TRONIC: he describes the album as a “revolt” against the shorthand often used to signify Arabic culture in electronic music. No stock oud, no familiar sample-pack exoticism, no obligatory “Habibi”. Instead, the Jordanian artist has gone considerably deeper, drawing on the Bedouin songs and chants of his childhood, Arabic microtonality, regional poetry and stories with direct connections to his own family.
The result sits somewhere between cultural excavation and electronic experimentation. Melodic techno provides its framework, but IRTH-TRONIC is really concerned with what happens when a musical tradition is approached from within rather than reproduced through familiar signifiers.
We spoke to Sarayrah about growing up with music in Jordan, discovering rave culture and Boards of Canada, building microtonal synth systems, the limitations of Western harmony and why IRTH-TRONIC feels more like the beginning of an idea than its conclusion.
You grew up in Jordan within a Bedouin community. What did music sound like around you when you were young, and what were your earliest musical influences?
I grew up surrounded by music as part of everyday life, music was present in all family gatherings, celebrations, and social occasions. I remember my brothers playing oud and tabla, and the family singing Khaleeji and Bedouin songs together. Sometimes my grandmother would break the silence of the house chanting Hjeni while doing house chores. Those experiences gave me an early relationship with rhythm, melody, and the idea of music as something that brings people together.
I think that environment shaped me very deeply, these sounds were simply part of the world around me. Looking back, I realised that many of the melodic phrases, rhythms, and ways of expressing emotion that surrounded me back then stayed with me, as my musical language took a different path.
What interests me today is exploring what those sounds left within me, and finding ways for them to re-emerge in today’s context from my point of view.
How did electronic music first enter the picture for you? Was there a particular artist, record or experience that made you want to start producing it yourself?
Electronic music first entered my life attending clubs and raves. As a musician coming from the band and live music world, I was fascinated by the energy and by how the focus seemed to be more on the crowd and the collective experience rather than on the artist themselves, that made me really appreciate the culture around it.
Seeing how some sounds could translate directly into people’s emotions and movement on the dance floor was eye opening to me, to see how powerful music can be.
At one point, a friend introduced me to Boards of Canada, and that opened up a completely different side of electronic music for me. I realized it wasn’t only about the physical energy of the dance floor, but much deeper. That was when I started seeing electronic music as a much broader language, and eventually became interested in creating it myself.
Before developing the sound we hear on IRTH-TRONIC, what did your early experiments with electronic music sound like? How long did it take to find a direction that felt distinctly your own?
I think it took me some time to really find my own direction. In the beginning, I would listen very carefully and try to recreate what I heard, maybe a kick from one track, a snare from another, or a bass sound from somewhere else. It was a way of educating myself and experimenting within the EDM world.
At the same time, I was carrying some of the sounds and ideas from my first album, which had more of an electro-psychedelic, alternative character. There was also an unexpected turning point when I accidentally deleted everything on my computer and had to recreate three tracks that were already finished. By the time that happened, my sound had evolved, so when I rebuilt them, they naturally evolved with it. Looking back, that process became part of how I found the direction that eventually led to this album.
IRTH-TRONIC brings Arabic microtonality into melodic techno. When you’re writing, how do you make sure those two musical languages feel completely integrated within the same track?
I see it more as an experiment than a standard integration. I don’t think there is really a fixed way to measure whether these two musical languages are integrated or not. They come from different worlds, and bringing them together creates something new. It’s a bit like mixing two colours, you can’t always predict the exact colour you’ll get, and depending on the depth and intensity of each one, the possibilities are endless.
At the same time, there are basic musical rules that I take into consideration. But within those boundaries, I try to leave enough space for experimentation and let the combination develop its own character.
Techno relies heavily on repetition, while Arabic musical traditions can be highly expressive and ornamented. What interests you about putting those characteristics together?
I think each style expands on the other. The repetitive nature of electronic music, when applied within an Arabic musical context, gives it a more predictable element, which is something Arabic music often lacks. I think that predictability has a lot of value, especially on the dance floor, because it creates a clear rhythmic foundation to move within.
On the other hand, bringing more expression and fluidity into electronic music sheds a light on the human side of music. It creates a balance between something structured and repetitive, and something more fluid and emotional.
You’ve spoken about creating custom tuning systems for synths such as Diva and Serum. Has working outside standard Western tuning changed the way you approach synthesis itself, beyond determining which notes are available?
Synthesis and sound design themselves are independent of the tonality we use. You can express an interval, whether standard or microtonal, with almost any type of sound, so whatever I know about synthesis and sound design is unaffected by the musical system I’m using.
Where it does affect my approach is when I start building harmony around microtonal melodies. Polyphony can sometimes sound weird, especially when you have a chord or pad underneath a microtonal line. Having too many notes at the same time can make the microtones in the chord stick out and create uncomfortable dissonance, in my opinion.
Because of that, I tend to use more open or suspended chords, or sometimes, when I want to use a microtone in a chord, I just add one more note to it rather than making it too crowded. Since a microtone is neither minor nor major in the Western sense, I find that keeping the harmony more open gives the melody more space. So in the end, the main focus of my approach is usually on the monophonic melody, and everything around it is built to support that.
You’ve been clear about wanting to explore your heritage without self-orientalising. Are there particular sounds, production choices or clichés you deliberately avoid because of that?
What I avoided the most was using VSTs to replace authentic traditional instruments. In my opinion, that has become one of the most overused approaches. I hear a lot of electronic tracks categorized as “Arabic” or “Bedouin” that rely on the same Oud, Qanoun … sounds played over the same Hijaz scale, and a vocal line repeating the word “Habibi.”
A lot of mainstream productions also seem to rely on the same “Arabic” loops and libraries, many of them created by Western producers and then reused over and over. So I completely avoided those overused, orientalist representations of our culture.
IRTH-TRONIC is, in many ways, a clear revolt against reducing our culture to those familiar elements. I didn’t approach these clichés as things I simply needed to avoid one by one; the album itself grew out of a desire to move beyond that kind of simplification and represent the culture from within.
Some of the material behind IRTH-TRONIC carries very specific personal and historical stories. How important is it that listeners understand those stories, and can the music communicate something meaningful without that context?
I think the stories behind the tracks in IRTH-TRONIC serve as little Easter eggs for those who want to dig deeper beyond the music. They’re another layer of the album, representing some of the region’s stories and legends that interested me, some of which aren’t even widely known here.
For example, a lot of people know “Ghosn Al-Gana” as a famous Yemeni song, but very few know that its lyrics transformed from a defamation song into a love song by the wisdom of judge mutahhar al ariani while keeping the same melody. Another example is Ben Hajhouj, which is built around a poem written by the mother of General Khaled Hajhouj Al Majali while he was leading the 40th Armored Brigade on the Syrian front in the 1973 war, where my late father was also serving. So for me, that track carries deep personal significance.
These stories aren’t necessary to understand or enjoy what you hear, but knowing them can reveal another rich layer of the culture and perhaps change the way you experience the tracks.
With IRTH-TRONIC establishing such a particular musical language, where do you want to take it next? Are there ideas from the album that you feel you’ve only started to explore?
In a way, IRTH-TRONIC was a documentation of my experience of learning both worlds: our traditional ways of chanting and poetry, which required me to research the stories and learn how to pronounce and perform them in their traditional way, alongside melodic electronic music.
I think the next step is to take everything I learned through IRTH-TRONIC and make it more intentional, writing my own poetry within the traditional style I’ve learned, developing the musical language further, and collaborating with traditional artists whose work may not be widely known. For me, this album isn’t the final destination; it’s the point where these two sides of my musical identity began to meet, and I’m curious to explore how that journey unfolds.
