Egyptian singer Maryam Saleh strikes an irreverent but introspective tone on her new single “Baghanny” as she ponders the challenges of a creative life. “Every time I sing, I find / I raise my voice, the more I raise, the more I find… I find that my voice is not my own,” she sings in Egyptian Arabic over a synthpop beat laid down by Syrian producer Hello Psychaleppo. It’s a powerful sentiment coming from a beloved icon of alternative Arabic music, who has explored countless creative directions in her career. Saleh wrote the track’s lyrics, and in a few lines she alludes to a lot of complex feelings—of being responsible to your fans, of facing down critics, of looking for a new creative spark. In the end, she can’t help but continue with her lifelong passion: “Despite myself, I want to sing.” 

And sing Saleh does on this candy-coloured earworm. Hello Psychaleppo is best known for his electronic take on Tarab music from Arabic classical tradition, and here the duo structure their lyrics and riffs around a genre of lighthearted songs called the taqtoqa. The beatmaker infuses his whimsical, four-to-the-floor builds with ebullient Arabic synth phrasings and rhythmic syncopations. “Baghanny'' takes a breezier turn compared to some of his past work, with a drum machine that clicks together like clockwork. But then he delivers a dose of pure joy with an anthemic hook that can easily get stuck in your head long after the track has come to an end. Naturally, Saleh is a game collaborator, her yearning refrains giving the club-friendly groove a human touch. 

Maryam Saleh habitually pushes the boundaries of Arabic music. A luminary of Egypt’s alternative music scene, she delivers a savvy mix of old and new, infusing shaabi and folk styles with innovative techniques and fearless personality. Once described as a “musical supernova” by Scene Noise, Saleh is a singer, composer, actor, and poet. As the teenage frontwoman of the band Gawaz Safar in the early 2000s, she revived the decades-old protest songs of folk legend Sheikh Imam for a younger audience. She broke new creative ground with the dizzying electro beats and sarcastic poetry of 2015’s Halawella, a critically-acclaimed album she recorded with Soap Kills’ Zeid Hamdan. In 2017, she boosted her profile even further across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe with Lekhfa, an opus of haunting lyricism and transcendent psychedelia made in collaboration with musicians Tamer Abu Ghazaleh and Maurice Louca and poet Mido Zoheir. Since the late 2000s, she has also taken on memorable roles in TV, theatre, and film—including Ibrahim El-Batout’s Ein Shams (2008) and Tamer El Said’s In the Last Days of the City (2016). 

Hailing from one of the most musically rich cities in the Levant, Hello Psychaleppo is the brainchild of pioneering Syrian music producer and visual artist Samer Saem Eldahr. Deeply rooted in Arabic music, Hello Psychaleppo’s work captivates listeners with melodic strains of Tarab threaded seamlessly with his distinct strain of electronic music.

Hello Psychaleppo’s first album “Gool Lʼah”, pioneered the genre of Electro-Tarab, with his productions gaining a significant following both in the Arab World and internationally. Described by VICE Magazine as “a pastiche of twitchy electronic sounds and golden age Arab pop music of the 1950s and 60s… alternately danceable and cathartic, melancholic and apocalyptic.” Since his seminal 2013 release, Hello Psychaleppo has released two full albums, “HA”  (2014) and “Toyour” (2017), the EP “Jismal” (2021) alongside a wide array of collaborations with artists such as Bu Nasser Touffar, El Far3i and Nass El Hal and most recently with Turkish pop artist Mabel Matiz.

“Baghanny” is written and performed by Maryam Saleh, composed by Tamer Abu Ghazaleh, and produced and mixed by Hello Psychaleppo. Mastered by Josh Bonati with an artwork play on her debut record “Mesh Baghanny”, by Omar Mostafa.

For more information contact Simsara Music / sarah@simsara.me

NOTES TO EDITORS

Maryam Saleh biography 

Born and raised in Old Cairo, Saleh grew up surrounded by art and music. Her father, Saleh Saad, was a prominent playwright and theatre director, and Maryam was just nine years old when he recruited her to join his innovative theatre company. Rather than stage productions in a playhouse, the group roved across the country to put on free shows on the streets of villages and small cities. Maryam often took on the role of the Farfour, a clown character who guides the story along in the manner of the Harlequin comic servant from Italy’s commedia dell'arte. The idea of the clown—as an entertainer, mischief-maker and cultural commentator—has played a recurring role in Saleh’s art ever since. 

Saleh’s mother, Amany Ibrahim, was a singer and an actor who hipped her at a young age to a potent mix of sounds—everything from the groundbreaking work of Palestinian band Sabreen and Lebanese composer Marcel Khalife to the pop classics of Kadim Al Sahir and Samira Said. Saleh’s family frequently hosted musical gatherings at their home in Old Cairo, and Sheikh Imam would regularly drop by with his oud to perform alongside his longtime collaborator, the peoples’ poet Ahmad Fouad Negm. Saleh’s mother regularly performed with Imam, and in the years before his passing in 1995, the blind songsmith also regularly sang at young Maryam’s birthday parties. 

During their heyday in the 1960s and ’70s, Imam and Negm were infamous for their mocking odes to venal politicians and propaganda spectacles. As a little kid, Saleh found a childlike appeal in the duo’s barbed comedic wordplay and simple, chantable melodies. Her destiny as a future champion of their populist repertoire was sealed one morning, when she woke up and started singing a song that she insisted she’d written in her dreams—only to be told by her parents that it was a Sheikh Imam tune he’d been singing the night before. 

Today you can hear echoes of Saleh’s creative upbringing through her muscular voice, rebellious lyrics, and charismatic stage presence. Although she has received some training in classical Arabic forms, she often minimises the ornamental formalities of traditional Arabic singing (or does away with them entirely) in favour of a direct, soulful style. Her songs are full of intensity and introspection, but like Imam, she also dishes out irreverent humour and jabs at critics—most notably on her 2012 debut album, Mesh Baghanny (I Don’t Sing), whose title alone dismisses critiques of her unique style. “I don’t sing, I don’t say, I don’t sleep, I don’t rise,” she declares on the album’s defiant title track. Over dramatic piano and fuzzy rock guitar, she defines who she is by tossing out a confetti of contradictions and superlatives: “I’m especially and basically, I’m everything and every day.” 

Saleh started focusing on music in the early 2000s. Hanging out in downtown Cairo, the high-school phenom ditched the private tutoring her parents sent her to and used money to pay for the lessons to instead go to shows and fund projects. She formed an impromptu band that played a variety of regional folk songs and then launched Gawaz Safar (Passport in Arabic). In 2003, she secured her place as a key member of the Cairo scene—and won over her increasingly nervous parents in the process—with two breakthrough Gawaz Safar performances at the newly-opened venue El Sawy Culture Wheel. 

The budding star faced a devastating setback in 2005 when her father was killed in a fire during a theatre performance at a playhouse in the city of Beni Suef. The catastrophic accident took the lives of dozens of members of Egypt’s theatre community, and Saleh went silent for two years, paralyzed with grief. Gradually, she turned back to the theatre and other creative pursuits. She found a second home as a member of El Warsha Theatre Troupe, with whom she immersed herself in a repertoire of Egyptian folkloric performances and poetry. She also formed the band Baraka to feed a growing interest in psychedelic rock. While she continued playing Sheikh Imam’s songs, she also began writing her own, working with the poets Mido Zoheir and Omar Mostafa to set their lyrics to music. 

In the early 2010s, Saleh’s musical pursuits reached even greater heights when she struck up collaborations with Tamer Abu Ghazaleh (a Palestinian, Egypt-based composer and oud and buzuq player) and Zeid Hamdan (a Lebanese producer best known as co-founder of the trip-hop duo Soap Kills). Working with them and others, Saleh has been able to focus in on different facets of her many talents. Halawella includes electro-pop reinventions of Sheikh Imam and Ahmad Fouad Negm’s songs—their brazenly hilarious social commentary resonating anew on a bed of whimsical arrangements and sing-song melodies. Lekhfa, on the other hand, presents lyrical visions of disillusionment and despair even as Saleh, Abu Ghazaleh, and Maurice Louca forge a progressive path through an innovative mix of Arabic instrumentation, electronic grooves, and Saleh and Abu Ghazaleh’s cathartic vocals. 

Further into the 2010s, Saleh joined Kamilya Jubran’s catalysing workshops for emerging musicians, along with some of her contemporaries such as Nancy Mounir, Nadah El Shazly and Dina El Wedidi. Her relationship with Jubran continues to this date, the latter becoming a crucial mentor in Saleh’s journey as a lyricist and songwriter. 

After a five-year hiatus, Saleh sounds refreshed on her May 2023 single “Baghanny.” The track’s title and cover art serve as a callback to her debut album from over a decade earlier, and the lyrics show Saleh continuing to progress as an artist. She’s resumed writing her own lyrics, and on “Baghanny” she sings about raising her voice and finding her muse. It’s a clear sign that this daring artist has more avenues to explore on her lifelong creative path.