Simsara Music سمسارة للموسيقى and its artists keep 100% of sales and get paid the moment you purchase their work on Catalog. Thank you for reading and listening :) Lead photo by Petre Fall, courtesy of imageandsound.ro.
When I was living in Egypt in 2017 and 2018, the Cairo band Lekhfa’s song “Teskar Tebki” was so popular that they ended up performing it multiple times in one night during a concert. The band consists of musicians Maryam Saleh, Tamer Abu Ghazaleh, and Maurice Louca, and their underground hit left such an impression on me that it ended up turning into a personal anthem.
Released on the album Lekhfa, the track is anchored by a restless piano loop and punchy shaabi rhythm. It’s basically a dance jam, but a haunting one: Louca sets down a dense pattern of doom tak percussion samples at a meditative 100 BPM while Saleh and Abu Ghazaleh take turns singing, their intertwining voices mingling with slide guitar and synths in a hallucinatory haze. The lyrics, written in colloquial Egyptian Arabic by the late poet Mido Zoheir, center the image of a man getting drunk and crying uncontrollably. As the song progresses, Saleh and Abu Ghazaleh ruminate on the man’s flaws and the cruelty of the world around him, repeating their words over and over in a devastating inventory of his sorry state:
Because your friends were motherfuckers
And because your laugh became a wail
And because the pale faces of the past left in your heart a bleeding wound
You get drunk and weep like a child
My interest in “Teskar Tebki” started casually, when I booked a lesson with my Arabic teacher to translate the lyrics. We met one afternoon on the second-floor balcony of the Cilantro coffee shop in downtown Cairo, a couple blocks from Tahrir Square. Chatting in casual Arabic, we looked over a printout of the lyrics line-by-line and I jotted down notes with a pencil. That was the start, but I didn’t really, truly understand “Teskar Tebki” until later on. Months went by, and step by step my own life began to resemble the nightmare scene pictured in Zoheir’s lyrics. There were late nights at Horreya bar drinking too many Stella beers. There was a security glitch on my web browser that ruined an important freelance job, and later a bottle of water that tipped over and decommissioned the laptop itself. More positives flipped into negatives until I finally found myself breaking down in my soon-to-be ex girlfriend’s bedroom as she looked on with smiling pity. “You look so cute when you cry,” she said.
I first came across Lekhfa in a rawer form, as rough mixes on a SoundCloud link sent to me by Lekhfa’s manager, Sarah El Miniawy سارة المنياوي. The album has been close to my heart ever since, and so have many other projects that Miniawy has worked on. She is the founder and director of Simsara Music, a boutique agency based out of London and Cairo that specializes in experimental Arabic music. The agency does all it can to chart a map through an increasingly “Teskar Tebki”-esque music world of razor-thin profit margins, algorithm-driven marketing pressures, and deeply unbalanced political power structures. One of Simsara’s primary goals is to achieve economically sustainable careers for the artists on its roster, and they’ve been able to do so without having to sacrifice their financial accountability or artistic integrity. “We can say new genres, sounds, grassroots working models, whatever you want to call them, almost always come from the underground, and it is because the latter operates on its own terms,” Miniawy says. “As soon as it’s co-opted by the industry, coined, stolen, signed, standardized, it stops being musically generative and it all starts sounding the same. Personally I have no problem with remaining small and underground forever.”
Over the past decade, Simsara has provided support for a sprawling list of acclaimed projects, including Lekhfa and Nadah El Shazly’s Ahwar, two releases from 2017 that brought international attention to Cairo’s music scene and expanded the creative boundaries of the region’s alternative scene. In 2022, Miniawy launched the label Simsara Records to release Nancy Mounir’s Nozhet El Nofous, which ended up on numerous album-of-the-year lists from Cairo Scene to NPR. More recently, Simsara has worked with Louca on multiple projects. Last year, they commemorated the 10th anniversary of his 2014 masterpiece Benhayyi Al-Baghbaghan (Salute the Parrot) with a remix album and a slate of sold-out shows in Cairo and Beirut. Last month, Simsara released Louca’s latest solo effort, Barĩy (Fera), an ensemble piece of microtonal melodies and intricate rhythms that stands as some of his wildest, most pensive work.
Raised in Algeria and Egypt, Miniawy was originally trained in contemporary dance before devoting herself to music full time. A formative concert partially sparked that shift: in the early 2000s, the Palestinian composer and oud player Kamilya Jubran performed at the Townhouse Gallery in downtown Cairo with a wide-eyed Sarah in the crowd. Jubran’s music is rooted in classical Arabic poetry and performance repertoire, but works like hers and Hassler’s 2005 album Wameedd completely reinvent the traditions with exploratory instrumentation, synths, electronic beats, and the poignant precision of Jubran’s vocal technique and lyrics.
“I had never heard of her before. So imagine entering and then seeing Kamilya,” Miniawy remembers. “It was like, Wow, what is this? This exists? You can hear Kamilya’s pedigree in classical Arabic. But then also you hear this idea of going somewhere completely unknown. That concert really opened my imagination to the possibility of walking in the dark.”
After several years running the Simsara operation solo, Miniaway now runs the agency with May Mostafa, Donia Shohdy, and Maii El Shabrawy. I’ve known Miniawy since 2016, but this summer marked the first time I actually got on a call with her to do a formal interview. I drank La Croix and she smoked hand-rolled cigarettes while we talked for two hours about the history of Simsara, the logistics of artist management, imbalances between Western markets and ‘The Region,’ as well as the responsibility of artists, industry workers, and creatives as we go about our business (or don't) under the shadow of ongoing genocide in Palestine. Our conversation’s been edited for length and clarity.
Peter. So.
Sarah: How should we do this?
Peter: I was wondering that too. [Laughs]
Sarah: Let's see how it goes…
Peter: How did you get into music?
Sarah: I've always been a listener. A hardcore listener. That’s from my childhood in Algeria. I had 11 aunts and uncles, so it was a very crowded childhood in a nice way. You were constantly exposed to the musical tastes of so many people, and it was a huge variety. You had the classic rock school, the singer-songwriters, but then you had the Algerian music. Algeria is super rich in genres; it's almost like a continent.
That always stayed with me and with my brother as well. Then when I was 16, I was doing all these summer jobs. I was in a contemporary dance company for so many years in Cairo, and that was my introduction to the world of arts in Egypt basically. When I finished my undergrad, I was looking for a job, and I had two job offers. One of them was with a nice, big salary in a telecoms company, and the other one was a volunteer position with no job description and no salary at the Townhouse Gallery. And I obviously went for the Townhouse Gallery job.
There was also this concert that I went to, around 2003. One of the dance school coaches took me and another dancer to this concert. He didn't tell us what it was. He just said, “You're coming.” I went, and it was Kamilya Jubran with Werner Hasler and Sarah Murcia.
Peter: Oh, wow, okay!
Sarah: I had never heard of her before. So imagine entering and then seeing Kamilya. It was like, Wow, what is this? This exists? It was quite formative actually, that concert. Just hearing her, her music, and knowing exactly where it’s coming from. You can sense Kamilya’s pedigree in classical Arabic. But then also you hear this idea of going somewhere completely unknown. That concert really opened my imagination to the possibility of walking in the dark.
I think she plays a role as a mentor, but also as an inspiration to a lot of the contemporary artists today and that Simsara worked with as well. She’s like a compass. Then fast forward, much later, I did get to work with Kamilya, and I still do. We did the PR for one album [Jubran and Hasler’s Wa, which came out on Akuphone in 2020] and I booked a tour for them in the region.
Peter: You moved to London after Cairo and worked at the Barbican for seven years before starting Simsara in 2014. Social media has been a big part of music for the past decade, of course, but the pressure on artists to be a multimedia production keeps rising.
Sarah: Also, since COVID onwards, the budgets for the arts are completely decimated. Things have become even heavier than they already had been to promote music, to book music — to sell music, as it were. I think the danger of social media now, for me, is on the creative process. When you’re sitting by yourself or with whoever you collaborate with, you still have an idea that you're trying to catch. But now, before you even catch it, you’re already thinking about how you're going to post it. If we think about inspiration or the muse, a musical idea or an art idea as something that's very fragile, it's something that comes to you, right? And it comes to you in a very elusive form. You have to kind of isolate yourself to just let it arrive and understand what it is, and you have to follow this magical thread to allow this thing to grow. But in that very fragile moment that you're supposed to protect, you can't. You're only thinking about how people are going to see this, how many people are going to hear this. And that's the enemy of any honest expression. That's what you're up against, really, as an artist.
Peter: What do you look for when you're working with artists? What's your process?
Sarah: It always starts with the music. Listening to the music and liking it a lot. It's super subjective. And then obviously with Maurice and Maryam Saleh [a singer and actor from Egypt], we've been working with both of them for such a long time, for almost 10 years. So the chemistry between people is very important as well. But it always has to start with the music. We like the music. We believe in it. We want to work on it. We feel like we want to be part of it.
Peter: You were talking about going into the unknown with music. Have there been any examples of experiences where you've done that and it paid off really well?
Sarah: I think it's just the modus operandi, essentially. I can give an example: Maurice's album Elephantine [released in 2019 on Northern Spy]. I had spent two years in Sweden, where the arts are so much more supported. There's no gatekeeping, essentially, because there is enough for everyone, though I hear that it’s of course changing. It was 2017 and we had Lekhfa coming out later that year, so I organized a residency for [Maurice, Tamer, and Maryam] in Sweden to develop the live version of the record. It was January, freezing, and in between walking to the studio or somewhere together, Maurice said, “I have this composition. It’s for a big band, and it's, like, 13 musicians. I'm obsessed with brass and wind instruments right now. There’s two drummers, and it’s this whole big thing.” I remember laughing. I was like, “Maurice, why? What are you talking about? We’re struggling to tour a six-piece band … But okay, I'm due to apply for a grant anyway, so let's write something together really quickly.”
I had no idea what I was doing, but it sounded exciting and I trust Maurice. If we were preoccupied with how it’d end up, how we’d sell it or find the money or position it for TikTok, there’s no way he would have followed through with this composition and let it come.
Peter: That’s amazing.
We ended up getting the grant money for Maurice’s idea, then we started looking for the musicians. Of all the musicians Maurice recorded with, there were only two he had known and played with before. We found them by asking around and watching some of their videos. Then it was actually Maurice communicating with them online about his demos and telling them what he had in mind for this instrument or that. [When it came time to record the album], I think we had eight days in Stockholm: four days for rehearsals, four days for recording. Maybe even less. It was a gamble in a way. It was the first time I had gotten involved so early on in the creative process as well. Literally, it was magic. Maurice has an amazing instinct for leadership, which is something I discovered during that process. I got to witness firsthand how he walks this tightrope between knowing exactly what he’s after for the composition and the overall sound yet allowing space for the collaborating musicians to bring in their ideas and character into the work.
Lekhfa and Nadah El Shazly’s Ahwar both came out in 2017, and both ended up becoming high-profile releases with lots of critical acclaim and tours in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and beyond behind them. Simsara was just you at the time, right?
I think there are some things where you end up getting baptized by fire, because the demand suddenly hits you. And whether you're ready or not, you have to go in.
I was working with different entities. Mostakell was releasing Lekhfa, Nawa Recordings was releasing Ahwar. We had a booking agency. We had all these different people collaborating, but essentially, you're at the center with the artists. You're in the middle, and you have to talk to all these people. I think the part that was more stressful back then was the really small profit margin. I’m talking about touring bands here, not solo/duo artists. You have all the travel and all the different musicians based in different places and different visa applications and different itineraries, and you have to run this crazy tight operation.
Financially, you're not going, Whatever, we'll see what happens. You're actually, in advance, trying to make very precise decisions. No surprises: These tickets have to be booked for this price. If they’re booked for anything more than this, we're fucked. Suddenly, very basic tasks, like booking a flight, become very stressful. You feel like the destiny of a whole tour lies in the price of the flight. And it depends on the prices of the flights today, which completely changed from two days ago when we looked at it and accepted the offer. The aviation industry is fucking us over. It’s like, what the hell is going on? If you search for the same flight too many times, the algorithm picks it up and it spikes the price. Shouldn't this be regulated? I think it’s safe to say our material conditions changed post-algorithm.
Beyond these seemingly mundane day-to-day tasks that end up making you realise what kind of extractive machines you are up against (whether it’s the airlines or visa sections at embassies), touring these two works was incredibly exciting. In Nadah’s case with Ahwar, I don't think an artist from the region has toured an album so extensively. I think we did over 130 shows.
Peter: It must get really complicated managing the travel visas. A lot of the projects you work with include artists from multiple countries, and you book lots of shows across the Arab region and in Europe and the United States. Those dynamics, the hoops you have to jump through, are probably symptomatic of everything else.
Sarah: Thankfully, it became an operation we know how to do very well: how to do it, when to do it, and when to say, No, we’re not doing this. I think of myself as a manager, in comparison to Western managers, and there's this additional 30% load that has to do with mobility that the average manager working with a Western band simply doesn't have to consider.
I've had these kinds of fights with some programmers who think it's my responsibility and the Arab artists’ responsibility to take care of their own visas. Who is asking for the visa? It's your country, so it’s actually your responsibility. It’s not mine. I'm not the one closing the door. It’s like inviting people to your home and then you have a security guard standing outside who's not letting anybody in, and just telling your guests to fend for themselves with the security guard. So uncivilized. Your supposed colleagues and peers in the Western industry are on another planet.
I remember going to a Creative Europe event in London — I can’t remember if it was just before or after Brexit — and here they were hyperventilating about possible challenges they will face in their mobility with a British passport, completely oblivious to the fact that for most artists they had ever met or seen live in the UK from the Global South, it has been a frankly humiliating, arduous, costly and risky process to get a visa to perform in the UK. And very few people in the British and European music industry ever spoke about it, even though it’s their responsibility.
Peter: Should we talk about Palestine? Is that something you feel comfortable talking about in the article? I think you can draw a line between what you’re describing in music, that general lack of empathy for and solidarity with the Global South, to put it mildly, and what’s happening there now, which hangs over and affects everything. I’ll go about my day-to-day life, do my creative pursuits, and then I’m like, “Oh yeah, there’s a genocide happening that my government is funding and fully supporting.”
Sarah: Yeah. In a way, I think a lot of us are not surprised, even though nothing prepares you for the scale of day-to-day horror and cruelty people in Gaza are facing. You know what I mean? I'm not Palestinian, so I can't claim that my human experience is anywhere near that of a Palestinian. But at the end of the day, I'm an offspring of a country that was colonized. So you know very well what's happening. And of course, this is where it's going. This is where it was always going. And you look at the most vocal people today, and they’re mostly people of color. The majority of white people are too scared to speak in the industry, or they’re hiding behind the veil of being “civilized,” as in they don’t talk about “politics” publicly because it’s ‘inappropriate.’ It's just like, what the fuck? You're like zombies. Because when you look at people of color or people who come from the region or live in the region, the stakes are higher for speaking up, but they’re still doing it. They're willing to lose everything. But then for the average white person in the industry, I'm sorry, the stakes are nowhere near as high for you when you speak.
And it just brings into question… like, this whole industry that we're inhabiting is full of people who don't give a shit about you. In fact, they are ready to throw you under the bus to protect themselves. It just makes you feel like this is not the industry I want to be in. There isn't even the desire to talk to another white middle class colleague in the arts anymore. The “speaking truth to power” thing is so off-putting now. I think to myself, I didn’t come here to fight for freedom of expression or whatever, because this fight benefits my white colleagues more than it benefits me actually. So why should I put my neck on the line for them? It’s not a good feeling, this festering, to carry around. You want to eject yourself from the sphere of that power as opposed to speaking to it. Of course the bigger question is: why are we here as global south diasporas? Are we always going to be here? And where do we go? Supposedly, everybody working in the arts is on the left. We were supposed to be on the same page about this.
I don't like the idea of expecting artists who don't use [political] language or don’t normally do political songs to just speak politics and talk about politics because they come from a certain part of the world. I don’t, okay? But this is a very different moment. I'm actually not asking you to make art or a song about this. I am asking you to speak in plain terms and say that you are against this, as somebody who has a following. That it’s genocide. It’s as simple as that. Don’t tell me this in a private conversation, say it in public. And don’t wait until it’s safe and beneficial for you to do so, like they all did during the BLM movement. White music industry workers finally spoke en masse about Black lives when it carried zero risk for them to do so.
Peter: It's really not too much to ask for.
Sarah: Honestly, no, it's not. And you will lose stuff. But, you know, you join everyone else in losing stuff! That's what it takes. You would only lose the stuff that was mired in corruption. Chances are whatever opportunity you're going to lose contains money that comes from Zionism. So then you will know exactly what you were doing.
Peter: When you reflect on Simsara’s impact over the years, where do you see your work fitting into the grand scheme of things? It’s a time when the role of the artist seems to be constantly in flux and the conditions for independent musicians have gotten so dire, as they have for so many of us more broadly.
Today when I look back on Lekhfa, or Elephantine, or Ahwar or really most of the records we worked on, I realise that the sanctity that you give to the creative process, especially in its embryonic stage, protecting it as much as you can against the extractive capitalist music industry (and all other industries you are forced to deal in) and the FOMO you get from social media, this sanctity, and relentless attempts at independence in a sense, gives you records and works that stand the test of time. Meaning that you will listen to these records decades from now and you will still love them. The history of music is full of such records and they often come from artists who defied the conventions, the political economy and material conditions of their time. Sometimes it feels like this is all we have. The industry is telling you to produce more frequently and to scale down your production ambitions and costs, while it scales up its revenue and cuts you out of it more and more every day. Then essentially what we’re trying to do with the artists we work closely with, such as Maurice and Maryam today, is to think of ourselves as a nucleus that has to operate within warped conditions. How can it continue to operate on its own terms?
You can also think of the underground in this way. We can say new genres, sounds, grassroots working models, whatever you want to call them, almost always come from the underground, and it is because the latter operates on its own terms. As soon as it’s co-opted by the industry, coined, stolen, signed, standardised, it stops being musically generative and it all starts sounding the same. Personally I have no problem with remaining small and underground forever. We fucked the planet and ourselves, all humanity, enough with growth, scale, greed. And in the music industry that takes the form of larger-than-life structures such as big music groups, record labels that claim to be independent yet own the masters, streaming platforms that presented themselves as saving artists and music from piracy and are now practically stealing income from artists. AWAL (Artists Without A Label) is now owned by Sony. It’s a joke. If entities such as Boiler Room, or NTS or Sonar did not get dragged into growth and scale they can’t afford to keep up, they would not be getting bought up in the last decade by the likes of KKR, UMG, etc.
Simsara Music and its artists keep 100% of sales and get paid the moment you purchase their work on Catalog.
