Headphone Highlights – Yasmine Hamdan: Music from the Arab World

Spending her young life living between her native Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Greece, Kuwait and Paris, where she now lives full-time, it’s no surprise that Yasmine Hamdan has woven the multi-faceted and vast sounds of the Arabic diaspora into her energised electronic folk-pop. Writing songs in English during her university studies inspired by PJ Harvey and Kate Bush, she was searching for something more when one night, she heard a song by mid-20th century Syrian singer Asmahan in a bar in Beirut. Enthralled by Asmahan’s pulling of classical Arab musical tropes into a contemporary framework, Hamdan was inspired to start singing in Arabic – and it changed her musical journey.