EL KHAT

About

El Khat does not make music for maps or borders but for the displaced, the restless, and the free. As children of refugees from Yemen, the band members look at their families' history not as a sob story, but as a blueprint for absolute creative freedom. Their mission is a bold hijacking of time. They dig up old Yemeni traditional folk melodies, strip them of nostalgic dust, and violently renew them. Raw metal drumming, crashing jagged organ riffs and detuned brass into ancient percussive rhythms. It is an unpolished, raw celebration of a multiple identity that belongs everywhere and nowhere at once. After mapping this sonic journey across a trilogy of acclaimed studio albums; Saadia Jefferson (2019), Albat Alawi Op. 99 (2022), and Mute (2024) the collective recently staged their ultimate act of defiance: a fourth album existing entirely outside the digital grid, sold only as a physical record at their live shows. By refusing to let streaming policing their art, El Khat turns their music into a fleeting, face to face rebellion that echoes timelessly.

Instrument Making

Instruments-making is rooted in a liberating truth: everything you need is already within you. Consider the abandoned, "useless" objects on the street - they are no different than the flaws and insecurities you try to hide or criticize within yourself. Seeing problems as treasures, truth is not found by looking outward, chasing foreign validation, or wishing for outer salvation. Your roots, your lineage, your language are perfect. Love begins when you stop looking away.

This philosophy takes physical shape in their sound. For thousands of years, Yemeni musicians carved out an identity using the ultimate scarcity pounding rhythms out of metal plates, tin canisters, and oil containers. El Khat honors this ancient lineage, utilizing the exact same raw materials while injecting a fearless modern evolution. By anchoring discarded metal with contemporary strings, tuning screws, and pegs, they fuse centuries of survival with modern defiance. To speak your truth, the tools for your revolution are already lying at your feet.

Bio

El Khat began in 2018 as visceral awakening of frontman Eyal El Wahab, a self-taught multi-instrumentalist, composer, carpenter, and the visionary force behind El Khat. Born and raised to a family of Yemeni immigrants in Israel, El Wahab spent his youth navigating a world that often encouraged the erasure of his ancestral identity. His musical journey was entirely unconventional. He taught himself to play the cello on the streets, learning music completely by ear and worked in orchestras without knowing how to read a single note. His raw talent eventually landed him a professional seat as a cellist at the Jerusalem Andalusian orchestra, performing highly structured North African and Western classical music. Yet, despite the professional connivence, a deep sense of displacement lingered. Playing the music of other cultures left him feeling incomplete disconnected from his own bloodline.

The turning point came when El Wahab was introduced to "Qat, Coffee & Qambus: Raw 45s from Yemen”, a rare collection of traditional Yemeni field recordings from the 1960s. Hearing the urgent, metallic, and hypnotic sounds of his ancestors was an immediate spiritual call. El Wahab walked away from the security of the orchestra. Took a year of deep inside looking that than later led to founding El Khat (القات) named after the euphoric, social leaf chewed across the Arabian Peninsula. Melding his skills as a experimental carpentering with his musical vision, he began collecting recycled trash, plastic pipes, and oil containers from the streets, upcycling them into custom instruments on a quest to bring the traditional Yemeni sound. He was not trying to replicate the past but was launching a radical, psychedelic reimagining of Yemeni folk music, stripping it of nostalgia and updating it for today’s realities of migration and survival.

El Khat is a collective that defiantly lives outside the clean lines of modern geopolitics. As Yemeni Jewish Israeli Arab of Yemeni diaspora, Carrying multiple identities that based on immigration and tradition, fiercely refusing to carry a national flag or swear allegiance to a single identity. The band members look back at a complex ancestral history that places them in a unique, fluid space, their music stands as a powerful statement of open expression and anti-oppression in an increasingly fractured world. For El Khat, identity is not a relation to a piece of land, it is an uncontainable voice that belongs everywhere and nowhere at once.

From their very first notes in modest garages, El Khat’s aesthetic captured the fascination of the global music underground. Released through the acclaimed global-sounds label Glitterbeat Records, their trilogy of studio albums: Saadia Jefferson (2019), Albat Alawi Op. 99 (2022), and Mute (2024) has earned them staggering international praise. The Times (UK) hailed their live sets as a "life-affirming performance," celebrating their chaotic fusion of multicultural identity and brilliant polyglot wordplay. Songlines Magazine described their sound as a "delirious mix... a fantasy band, unmoored in time and place, both ancient and modern, otherworldly yet urgent." UNCUT Magazine celebrated them as "musically omnivorous... promiscuous folk-punk mongrels, not prim world-music puritans", while PopMatters lauded their record Mute as a captivating masterpiece, praising how their sparkling array of DIY tools work toward vital social messages. The band has taken their hypnotic, danceable retro-futurist show across the globe, performing at major tastemaker venues and prestigious international festivals.

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DIY Instruments

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