Kamilya Jubran and Werner Hasler’s performance at Café Oto, and Panel Discussion on the (De)Colonial Legacy of the 1932 Cairo Congress at King’s College London.
It was 7th of April that I joined the crowd of the legendary Café Oto, to witness the last artist residency of Beyond 1932 project, the prolific enduring duo Kamilya Jubran (member of the Palestinian band Sabreen) and Werner Hasler, a Swiss electronic musician and trumpet player. As the door opens at 7:30pm, I was not surprised to see the line stretched to the other side of the road, marking one of the most hellish days of the venue over the year.
The introduction was given by Dr. Rim Irscheid, the curator of the project, as she briefly recapped the journey as we come to the final residency performance of the Beyond 1932 programme, and introduced the artists: Kamilya on vocal and oud, and Werner on synthesizers, samplers and trumpet. The performance will be centered upon “وwa”, a twenty-year long project of experiment and exploration.
As much as the records of the duo may sound formal and comparatively conventional, the live performance is simply something else. In the sense it felt much more open, experimental, and spiritually immediate. Though there are original pieces, the performance was largely related to live recordings, Kamilya would firstly do the enchant or play the oud, and Werner thereafter make a swift maneuver over variations of variations.
As a beginner in learning oud playing, I was taught on the first day that it is about maqam music, to learn about maqams, chains of pieces of melodic organizations, whereas oud masters would free flow in between and connect maqams into taksims. This is not the case for Kamilya. Over the two hours on stage, as she told me afterwards, there is a consciousness decision on avoidance of recognizable maqam pathways, offering instead fragmented, repetitive, almost partial maqamat.
This refusal does not signal absence but constructs a fractured sonic condition, one marked by tension, interruption, and a quiet sense of resistance. In this space, maqam no longer functions as a stable framework, but as a trace that emerges only to dissolve. Her approach to the oud simply exceeds its conventional role: tones are struck, scraped, and sustained in ways that verge on percussion and even synthesis, extending the instrument beyond melodic articulation into texture and gesture.
The relationship between performer and audience, as Kamilya conceives it, is not grounded in shared comprehension, but in the possibility of a neutral, shared space of listening, despite differences in language or context, meaning is not transmitted but collaboratively shaped, and where technology becomes a means of curating what can be collectively perceived. The live sampling was a remarkable experience. While the end was a set song (yama), the rest was entirely improvised. In the Q&A session afterwards, moderated by Rim, Werner and Kamilya discussed the process of live sampling as a way to reconceptualize the materials, a call for change, “to be prepared for the process not the outcome”.
Throughout the performance, Kamilya’s approach to lyrics foregrounded sound over semantic clarity. Singing in both Arabic and French, her vocal touched many Arabic speakers and Palestinians in the audience, though my shallow knowledge in Arabic could not give me the same privilege. Yet this distance in language was not a barrier; rather, it was acknowledged and even reassured, both implicitly in the performance and explicitly during the Q&A. The texts themselves, drawn from Arabic poetry, were not presented as fixed messages to be decoded, but as sonic material to be experienced, and given to the audience upon entry.
Through fragmented vocal and the use of live sampling, Kamilya redirected attention toward the phonic and affective dimensions of language. In doing so, she remained committed to what she described as the artist’s task: “to get something new,” a pursuit that is at once cultural and technical. This is exactly how she interpreted her career, formerly as a member of the Palestinian band Sabreen, where her work was closely tied to collective, politically grounded expression. In her later practice, she moved toward more experimental and individual forms, expanding her artistic language through electronics, fragmentation, and a focus on sound beyond fixed lyrical meaning.
On the 9th of April, I entered the doors of King’s College London to witness the final session of the Beyond 1932 project—a panel discussion focusing on the (de)colonial legacy of the 1932 Cairo Congress. Hosted by Rim, the panel brought together speakers Tarik Beshir, vocalist and oud player; Hazem Jamjoum, historian and former British Library curator of twentieth-century audio recordings; Gülçin Özkişi, a researcher focusing on music from Turkey and the Middle East; as well as Kamilya Jubran, who joined once again.
The discussion was dense, layered, and at times overwhelming in its depth—offering a wealth of fascinating yet challenging insights that far exceeded what could be fully absorbed in a single sitting. What follows, then, is only a small fragment of what I was able to take away from this encounter.
The panel framed the 1932 Cairo Congress as a moment where music, technology, and politics converged in shaping what we now call “Arab music.” With the rise of commercial recording and the gramophone, there was, for the first time, a systematic attempt to archive and define a musical tradition—but this process was already selective and constructed rather than neutral.
Taking place after the collapse of the Ottoman order, the congress also tied closely to nation-building, with Egypt positioning itself as a cultural centre and actively curating a sense of “Arabness,” suggesting that this identity was being formed rather than simply expressed. At the same time, the involvement of European scholars introduced a clear imbalance: debates over microtones, maqam, and “purity” versus modernisation often placed Western frameworks in the position of authority, subtly shaping what counted as valid knowledge.
One specific form mentioned was the muwashshah, a classical Arabic poetic-musical genre that depends on subtle maqam knowledge, rhythmic structure, and ensemble skill. Although it is not simply an “oud technique,” its performance relies heavily on the kind of embodied musicianship: ornamentation, accompaniment, and modal sensitivity, those risks being under-credited when Arab music is translated into archives, recordings, and standardized categories.
Recording technologies reinforced this, as what was captured as “pure sound” became fixed as history, even though some of these forms were situational or even produced for the congress itself. In this sense, the Congress can also be understood as part of a longer political project associated with the legacy of Muhammad Ali Pasha’s regime, in which cultural production, music included, become entangled with the construction of a coherent “Arab” identity.
What emerged from the panel is that this was not purely an intellectual or artistic endeavor, but one shaped through collaboration between state interests and then emerging commercial forces, particularly recording industries that had a stake in defining, packaging, and circulating certain musical forms over others. As a result, the archive produced by the Congress “Arab music” is necessarily partial. Many performers, practices, and even entire genres were overlooked and slipping out of historical visibility.
A hundred years on, this raises an important critical task: not only to revisit what the Cairo Congress preserved, but also to recognize what it left out. The deficit is not just a gap in documentation, but a structural condition of how knowledge was produced, where certain forms of embodied, improvisatory, or locally embedded musical practices resist being fixed into records and therefore risk disappearance. To acknowledge this is to move beyond treating the Congress as a definitive origin point, and instead to see it as one moment within an ongoing process of selection, erasure, and reconstruction.
Huanran Gao is a PPE undergraduate of SOAS, University of London. Currently a beginner in oud and synthesizers playing. huanrangao@outlook.com