One Foot in the Archive, the Other on a Distortion Pedal
I first heard Al Tase3 through their song Nawwar, which, in retrospect, feels like a particularly appropriate way to meet them. There was something in the song that I knew but couldn’t quite place. That led me backwards into the album and into the music around it: the songs we grew up around and the songs we went looking for later.
In Lebanon, we are very good at loving things into stillness. Crystal el teta comes to mind, kept somewhere high and safe behind a glass cabinet door, brought out only when the occasion is important enough to justify the risk. You know it’s there. You know better than to touch it.
Music suffers from this particular reverence. We inherit the songs, but we also inherit the way we are supposed to hear them. Once something becomes heritage, it acquires a fragility of its own. Eventually, touching it begins to feel like disrespect.
Al Tase3 don’t seem interested in protecting the inheritance from themselves.
Talking to them, I was struck by how casually they move between things we tend to keep apart. They’re so unserious about very serious things. Their relationship with tradition is neither reverential nor rebellious for the sake of rebellion. They know the material. The result is music that can sound ancient and slightly delinquent at the same time.
Their songs live somewhere between tarab and distortion, which is perhaps where the Lebanese nervous system has been living anyway: metal and tarab, oud and electric guitar, inherited melody and contemporary frustration, held together by the occasional shou ya zalame energy of five friends making music together.
There is no clean line between old and new here. The old keeps leaking into the new, as old things tend to do.
There is just music.
Rooted, but not particularly well-behaved.
With one foot in the archive and the other on a distortion pedal.
Photo of the band by Peter Houaiss of Darkside Studios.
Making Arabic Rock
Everyone calls anything combining Arabic and Western music “fusion”, which can be a lazy category. Would you say Al Tase3 is trying to make rock more Arabic, or Arabic music more dangerous?
Al Tase3: That’s actually why we say in our biography that it’s a matter of translation, not fusion.
We don’t think “fusion” is a bad word, but it suggests two separate things being put together: Arabic music on one side and rock on the other. For us, the feeling is much the same. What makes people dance or get excited in Arabic music isn’t so different from what they experience in rock. They just don’t usually exist in the same space.
The distinction is where you start. Fusion would be taking an existing rock song and adding an Arabic scale or element on top. What we’re doing is we’re fundamentally starting with Arabic music and building the rock around it.
Look at System of a Down: their alternative rock has strong Armenian influences, but nobody needs to call them a fusion band. Tanjaret Daghet is a Syrian rock band. Autostrad is a rock band. Ultimately, it’s Arabic rock. We want to solidify Arabic rock as its own thing, rather than treating it as rock with Arabic elements added.
You could argue academically that everything is fusion, but then the word becomes so broad it doesn’t really tell you much. We’re making Arabic music heavier, perhaps more dangerous, and rock more Arab, more tarab-ish. We’re not trying to mix cheese with tabbouleh here [laugh]. We’re bringing together two styles whose emotional registers are already much closer than people assume.
Al Tase3 brings together five different people with different musical instincts. When those instincts pull in different directions, how do you decide what works for the band?
Al Tase3: We take a poll. [laugh]
The actual decision happens in the practice room. We generally start with an idea, and once we play it, the song tells us where it wants to go. Sometimes, when two directions compete, one starts making more sense to everyone. If not, we work around it. Compromise is part of the process. Once we agree that we’re working for the song, personal preferences become negotiable.
We experiment a lot. Sometimes we play songs live before releasing them to see how they feel and how the crowd reacts. Even after a release, we revisit things and change them live. It’s a never-ending process.
We also come from different musical backgrounds: funk, rock, hip-hop, metal, Arabic music, everything in between. That mix is what gives the band its sound. If one person were completely in charge and only listened to metal, we’d probably be playing metal all the time.
Now, it’s only half the time. [laugh]
We also have to be honest with each other. We challenge each other and say when something doesn’t land. Everyone has to be willing to work for the song, for the band, and for a sound we’re still figuring out. Instead of two ears, you have ten. Twelve if Hisham(the band’s manager) is with us.
Ultimately, the song decides.
You’ve gone from a ninth-floor balcony in Beirut to releasing your first album and playing increasingly visible stages. Is there something about moving into professional production that you were afraid you’ll lose?
Al Tase3: We never really set out to keep it as an intimate setting. We’re just doing us and focusing on the music. We still jam and work pretty much the same way. As we grow, we’re trying things we haven’t done before, and that comes with more responsibility.
When we’re playing bigger stages, we have to match the space and make sure we’re ready for it. But those intimate sessions are what make the bigger stages possible. We’re trying to put better systems in place for writing and rehearsing, so we can reduce the practical limitations and have more freedom when we play.
For us, becoming more professional has really meant organizing everything around the music so that the music itself can stay loose. We prepare so that when we get on stage, we can have fun and give it everything, whether we’re playing for 10 people or 10,000.
What we inherit
You’ve mentioned the likes of Wadih El Safi and Melhem Barakat as influences. What did you inherit from them that isn’t immediately audible?
Al Tase3: We live in the same country, and things haven’t gotten much easier since they started. They went through a lot of hardship trying to reach success. Melhem Barakat used to sleep in his car when he went to Syria. Before becoming Wadih El Safi, he carried the oud his brother had gifted him everywhere, even to work. From glass shops to shoe stores, he kept singing until his employers gave him an ultimatum: the oud or the job. He chose music.
For us, it’s their persistence and stubbornness for their art. You don’t see the years of work behind a band when you hear a song you like. We’ve spent more than three years refining our sound and our songs. They remind us to keep going even when the conditions aren’t in our favor.
There’s also their honesty and playfulness, which we all love. Melhem Barakat was a trailblazer; Wadih El Safi could take a song from any composer and make it his own. He gave his voice to everyone. That taught us, especially Youssef, who was heavily influenced by both, to morph to what others need from him, while showing them what he needs in return.
They were original. They weren’t trying to replicate someone else, though they had their own influences. Everyone is influenced by someone, whether through music, the way they live, or the social ideas surrounding them. All of that becomes part of what you make.
What parts of Arabic musical tradition do you feel protective of, and what parts are you perfectly happy to let go of?
Al Tase3: This is our heritage. We get to decide how it evolves. What we really want to preserve is the communal character of Arabic music: it’s music of the people, for the people. What we want to let go of is stagnation. If heritage doesn’t evolve, it becomes stagnant, and if it becomes stagnant, it’s destined to die.
We keep hearing a lot of the same harmonies, compositions, and ideas. Of course there are bands like Mashrou’ Leila and Autostrad who have pushed beyond that, but generally, there’s a feeling that Arabic music has been recycling itself.
Part of the problem is that Arabic music is getting watered down into a Western progression with a tabel or daff added on top. The core of the music doesn’t become worth preserving. It’s almost like whitewashing Arabic music.
That’s why bands like King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard become so interesting to us. They’re Australian and they play with maqams like bayats, but they approach them as microtonal music. We love them, but sometimes we hear that and think: This is our heritage. Why is it coming back to us?
That doesn’t mean people abroad shouldn’t experiment with these sounds. We use rock, funk, and jazz ourselves. But Arabic musical heritage is ours, and we want to engage with it and develop it here, rather than discover it secondhand.
There’s no single formula for doing that. Adding oud isn’t the definitive element to show where you come from. It works for us. Tekrar, for example, uses the buzuq in a more psychedelic, instrumental setting. They’ve found their own way. That’s really inspiring for us. We hope what we’re doing encourages other bands to go in their own direction fearlessly, too.
Headbanging to tarab
We tend to imagine tarab and metal as opposites: one associated with emotional ecstasy, the other with aggression. Do you think they’re much closer than we assume?
Al Tase3: There are a lot of Arabic composers, like Mohamed Abdel Wahab, Riyad El Sunbati, Asabji, who were directly inspired by classical music. People also argue that metal is heavily influenced by classical music, so there’s already a connection there.
For us, it comes down to the feeling. When someone gets completely carried away listening to tarab, we sometimes think that if they came from a metal background, they would have headbanged instead.
It’s the same emotions, just different projections. The tabel and derbake can be just as heavy as distorted guitars. Whether you’re screaming over loud music or getting lost in an Arabic melody, you’re showing emotion as loudly as you can.
There’s also an important distinction to make here. There’s tarab as a genre – the Abdel Wahab, Abdel Halim Hafez, Um Kulthum – and tarab as the act of losing yourself to the music. That can happen in any style. You can tontorbe from metal, too. What else would make someone headbang, throw themselves into a mosh pit, or jump out of their heart? What would make any normal person do that unless they’d completely lost themselves to the music?
Sometimes it’s a progression change or an unexpected note that blows your mind. That moment can happen anywhere.
You’ll know. Your face will give you away. You’ll do the stinky face.
[the band proceeds to demonstrate the involuntary stinky face: brows pulled together, eyes narrow, mouth twisting into that deeply serious expression. They hold it for a beat before everyone starts laughing – the least intellectual, most accurate description of tarab they could have given me]
There’s something very Arab about returning—to a melody, a phrase, a voice, a maqam. We keep coming back to the same emotions, people, and memories. At what point does repetition stop being musical and start becoming physical?
Al Tase3: Music has always been physical. Anthropologically, music and dance have always gone together, and repetition is part of what makes it so. It is deeply rooted in Arabic music. Umm Kulthum would sing the same few lines over the same melody for half an hour, even an hour. You keep hearing the phrase, but it doesn’t land the same way every time. Repetition changes how you experience it.
In our music, repetition is part of the composition and arrangement. It does something to your understanding of a song. It legitimises the phrase. It gives it weight.
There’s also something nostalgic about returning to a melody you know. We cover Ameh, a song by Ziad Rahbani, which repeats the same phrase over and over. We repeat it and bring in another instrument, so you start hearing the same phrase from a different perspective. It moves you differently.
Photo of the band by Peter Houaiss of Darkside Studios.
Ishrabu: A poem that hasn’t finished speaking
Did you encounter Ishrabu first as a Samih al-Qasim poem or through another musical rendition?
Al Tase3: We encountered Ishrabu as a text. We were already writing the song and looking for lyrics when Anthony came across Samih al-Qasim’s poem in a book of Palestinian poetry. The first line, “baed el aghani sarkhaton la toutribou”, really hit us because the music we had was already dissonant, angry, and frustrated. It wasn’t a tarab song at all. So, it felt natural to lay the lyrics over what we’d written.
The poem doesn’t give you much room to breathe, and we didn’t feel the need to hold back. What’s funny is that we didn’t know there were already three or four other renditions. We found out afterwards. To be honest, we’re glad we hadn’t heard them first. We kind of hacked at it our own way.
This means the poem is universal enough, and effective enough to keep taking on different forms.
What does it mean to perform a poem in 1967 in Lebanon today?
Al Tase3: Nothing changed. It’s depressing. If anything, things have arguably gotten worse. That’s part of why we love Ziad Rahbani so much and consider him a hero. His work still remains relevant for all the wrong reasons. That’s exactly the problem.
It’s sad that something from that time is still relevant. You read the lyrics and feel frustrated or angry because you realize we’re still dealing with the same things. That frustration becomes part of how we play it. We’re so angry because we’re still standing in the same place.
The song decides
Your album is self-titled. You have 9 songs totaling about 41 minutes long. It moves between very different emotional calibers. An album can sometimes reveal a band to itself as much as it introduces the band to an audience. What did making this album teach you about what Al Tase3 is?
Al Tase3: We like to go to Anthony’s house and eat rotisserie chicken [laugh].
Honestly, every piece of work we put into the band teaches us more about Al Tase3. Making this album, especially the way we made it, captured something very fundamental for Al Tase3: the energy we have when we play live. That energy is very difficult to reproduce in a studio album, and it’s debatable whether we captured it well enough, but the album conveys who we were at that point. The songs keep changing too. They sound different live, the dynamics shift, some parts are stronger, some parts have changed completely.
We were trying different things rather than sticking to one color. You can hear that in the music. We were figuring out what happens when all five of us bring our own ideas into the room. The album taught us how to become one entity: five very different people trying to reach one sound, rather than each doing something separately.
We don’t even listen to the same music. Ali and Anthony listen to a lot of metal; Tarek listens to Arabic music, jazz, and classical; Jawad listens to funk and Youssef is more of a hip-hop guy. We brought those different musical diets into one room and came out with an album.
We learned that we don’t have to be musically identical to function as one band.
And the result feels genuine to us. This is who we want to be.
Was there a moment during the making of the album when the five of you looked at each other and thought, “Oh. This is it”?
Al Tase3: Every song we record.
We had that happen with Zannan and Khayyal, where we changed certain parts during recording. Some of the cuts in Zannan’s chorus were almost last-minute decisions. We’d be rehearsing, trying things, and then suddenly we’d play something and everyone would go, “OK. This is it.”
That’s what we look for in every song. If we can’t reach it, we take the song back into the composition and keep changing things until we do. We pulled Ossit Masefe from our live shows because we weren’t getting that feeling yet. If we don’t feel it ourselves, we can’t expect the listener to feel it either.
The “This is it” feeling isn’t limited to the music. It can happen with the lyrics, the design, the wardrobe, the production. Law Hayyarouni is a good example. Youssef had written the lyrics and we’d finished the music, but Ali felt the song wasn’t saying anything. The lines rhymed and sounded beautiful, but something was missing. Ali reworte the lyrics, Youssef made some changes, and when we returned to the song, it made sense. This is what we mean when we say the song decides.
That’s the main drive for us. There are no other rules. We just have to feel that moment when the room changes and everyone knows: This is it.
Which song on the album do you feel is most similar to what Al Tase3 is becoming?
Al Tase3 [all agreeing in the same breath]: Khayyal, probably.
Khayyal opened the door toward the sound we’re trying to figure out now. It doesn’t necessarily sound exactly like where we’re headed, but there’s a lot in it we want to explore further.
Ishrabu and Zannan offer different possible directions, too. Even Nawwar, with its mix of rock and more traditional Arabic music, has something we’d like to explore. We’re still discovering our sound and want to see what happens when we push those ideas further.
Conversely, which song do you feel is the furthest from where the band is now?
Al Tase3 (altogether): Shbabeek. It was the first song we worked on together, and the first one Youssef started writing on when he joined the band.
We wouldn’t change it, though. We could revisit that same style and do something different with it.
That’s how we see the whole first album. It’s only nine songs, but it feels like it contains a blueprint for several directions we could take. The new songs are opening up others, too. Tirilalle, for example, is a bit different from Khayyal, though it has elements of both Khayyal and Zannan.
We have more ideas than concretely finished songs [laugh].
Photo of the band by Peter Houaiss of Darkside Studios.
The work of staying
Do you feel the Lebanese alternative music scene is becoming more popular? What do you think has changed in the past 10 years?
Al Tase3: There’s definitely a growing receptiveness for live music, specifically for independent artists.
For a while, DJs took over in Lebanon. People were used to live music, but DJs became much more convenient, and, in many contexts, were doing a better job than bands at that time. The band format became less convenient.
Now, with the prevalence of AI-generated music, people are searching for genuine human connection again. The more music becomes generated, automated, and endlessly available, the more valuable human presence can become.
The number of active bands matters, too. We believe a band’s success means another band’s success. The more bands are active, the more the scene grows, and the more open people become to seeing a band they don’t know. We see it as an ecosystem.
The younger generation helps too. There was an alternative scene 20 years ago, but it wasn’t as profound or met with the same kind of receptiveness. The new generation seems to be appreciating this more.
People are consuming music differently and looking for different things. Maybe live music is becoming valuable again precisely because so much of music has become convenient.
Have you noticed a change in how people relate to music?
Al Tase3: The past few years have affected us a lot. They’ve changed how young people in Lebanon relate to the world around them, and, naturally, how they relate to music.
We went through the economic crisis, the pandemic, the blast, and then the war, one after the other. A lot of people left Lebanon over the past seven years. Maybe that’s part of why more artists are emerging in the alternative scene: people need new ways to relate to what we call home.
It’s not necessarily about adapting to change. The changes themselves create space for artists to exist and for people, whether they’re here or elsewhere, to find new ways of relating to home.
Has living through these crises changed your relationship with making music?
Al Tase3: Tragedy can fuel artistic expression, but there’s a difference between tragedy giving you something to express and tragedy making you an artist. Not everyone responds to suffering by creating. Some people fall into depression. [laugh] Technically, we’re always on the edge of that ourselves.
In Lebanon, we eventually got used to there always being something happening. At a certain point, you decide to keep making music anyway. We’re carrying an umbrella in a country where it’s always raining, and we’ve decided to make music under this umbrella. Not because we don’t care about what’s happening. We feel the rain, and it affects us. But we can’t make our entire artistic lives a coping mechanism for everything happening in the country. It’s not nihilism. It’s quite the opposite. The only thing we can do is make music.
Being in a band helps. We’re lucky to have Hisham and each other. If one of us feels beat, somebody is going to pick him up. We have a responsibility toward each other, and we don’t have to go through all of this alone.
That support matters in the smaller setbacks. If we apply to a festival and don’t get accepted, it takes a hit on our morale. But we’ve learned not to let every disappointment become a verdict on the band. Half the job is showing up. If you keep showing up to every practice ready to play, and bring the same energy to the stage, you give yourself a chance to be heard. We started playing for twenty people, and we can still play for twenty people. We can still give a show everything we have, even when fewer people turn up than we’d hoped. Our mental headscape is much stronger now.
Bhamdoun was a good lesson in that. The first time we played in front of more than 500 people, a string broke during Zannan, and they started taking the chairs away while we were only four songs in. We’d brought the full wardrobe, the screen, everything ready for a proper show, and we gave those four songs everything. Of course it hit us. It was humbling.
But it was also an out-of-context place, and we couldn’t judge ourselves by that one show. We finished with maybe a hundred people in front of us, and it felt horrible. The following week, we played to 35 or 40 people in Ain Dara, and it was one of the most fun gigs we’ve ever had.
That’s what stubbornness means to us. You dust yourself off and keep going.
It comes down to consistency and stubbornness.
Al Tase3 pictured with Pia at their recent concert at the Beirut Art Center.
What would you like to make possible for other Lebanese musicians that wasn’t possible when you started?
Al Tase3: We don’t see music as a competition. There’s a misconception that if one band succeeds, another has to fail. It’s the opposite. When a band succeeds, it creates better opportunities for everyone: venues invest in proper sound systems, event organizers bring artists together, and audiences discover more Lebanese music. One good band can bring the eye to the whole scene.
That’s why we keep saying we’re not trying to grow in width, but in length. Everyone is trying to grow bigger. We all have to help each other.
Phenomy is a good example. They’re a metal band who’ve reached further than almost any band from Lebanon. They’ve played to 20,000 or 30,000 people and toured Eastern Europe. Even though we’re not a metal band, and neither are Tekrar or Sourgrass, their success helps us. Promoters abroad start paying attention to what comes out of Lebanon. So really it’s not a competition. It’s a community.
We also have to acknowledge the people who came before us. The Kordz were the bomb. They opened for Deep Purple. Bands like Electric Warriors, Force, Mounir Khaouli paved a real path in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. There’s no proper archive documenting what they did. What we’re doing now didn’t come out of the blue. We’re imagining what Arabic music could sound like if that direction had continued.
That’s also why we don’t believe in gatekeeping. When we went to FIMU in France, we could barely find any information about what the experience would look like or how the process worked. It was our first tour, so we decided to document it and turn it into a short documentary. Now, a band from Lebanon or the Arab world considering a similar festival can see what it looks like. Bands have already reached out to ask about our experience, and we tell them what we learned.
We discovered only afterwards that other Lebanese bands had been there before us. We simply didn’t know. That’s the kind of thing we mean when we talk gatekeeping: nobody tells you where to go.
A lot of it comes from scarcity. People think, “If I teach someone my trade, they’ll eat into my market.” But the market grows. We could sit with another band over coffee for hours and explain our whole trajectory. They’re not going to steal our music. They’ll make their own and learn from what we went through.
We didn’t get there by ourselves, either. A lot of people helped us, and we appreciate every effort. We’re lucky to have a community of bands who are also our friends. People lend us instruments and amps. On our last recording, we borrowed an amplifier and a guitar to expand our production value with what we had. We’d gladly do the same for another band.
Information is more accessible than ever. At the same time, the isolation has grown, too. You have the whole world in your hands, yet you don’t necessarily have to talk to anyone. There’s value in lived experience, in sharing what you’ve learned directly.
Ultimately, we want to make the space around us bigger, not just make Al Tase3 bigger. We want the next band to find what we had to search for ourselves. If a band started because of us and then went much bigger, that would be amazing. That’s the point.
Pia Tahan
Pia Tahan is a Beirut-based writer and cultural storyteller working across literature, music, and contemporary culture. Her work moves between the intimate and the political, with a particular fondness for what sits slightly outside the frame. She is behindwhoaskedmeanyways, a personal writing project built around confession, observation, and the ordinary evidence of a life. She is interested in what makes people tick, what makes art matter, and what happens when the two meet.
- Pia Tahan
