El Khat

Eyal El Wahab, or the founder of the electrifying Middle Eastern trio El Khat, turns trash into instruments, reconsiders the past for the future, and turns political disaster into personal artistic triumph. The members of El Khat—alongside El Wahab, drummer Lotan Yaish and keyboardist Galor Yefet—are the descendants of Yemeni expatriates, all of whom left their homeland after the country tightened its grip on Arab Jews there into an iron fist. (There are, by various reports, between one to five Jews left in Yemen now.) As a kid in Tel Aviv’s Jaffa, El Wahab learned to play cello without reading sheet music, then joined an Israeli orchestra so that he could learn music theory. But the 2012 Dust-to-Digital compilation Qat, Coffee & Qambus: Raw 45s from Yemen became his true artistic catalyst, prompting him to quit the orchestra and start building instruments using flotsam found around the city. Seven years later, El Khat—named for the leaf chewed for centuries in Yemen for its stimulant properties—released its debut.

El Khat’s music often sounds joyous, from the hammered drums and chanted harmonies on “Zafa” to the staccato riff that slides through “Ward.” But El Khat has seen too much to stay silent, so its music carries a kind of implicit resistance, conjuring an uprising that refuses to acknowledge the oppression by name. For instance, Mute, its brilliant 2024 album, was titled as a reference to the thing people do to one another because of a difference in color or nationality—that is, they silence one another by any means available. This sizzling music pushes back against such constraints, its psychedelic organs and complicated percussion seeming to smirk at logic itself. This is dance music for heavy burdens. “It’s not that special,” El Wahab told an interviewer about his homemade instruments. “In some countries that don’t have the best resources, that’s what they do. Part of the idea behind making those instruments is to keep that sound—simple sound, poor sound.” It’s about reclaiming what could be lost, making it loud again.