Masāfāt: Gaika, Lafawndah and Muqata'a (Ramallah Collective)

Gaika, Lafawndah and Muqata'a (Ramallah Collective) perform on the third night of live performances.    

Brixton-born Gaika brings together the myriad sounds and voices of London. There’s dancehall verses, UK Bass, grime, snippets of trap as if heard from a passing car. Fusing together the discrete things that make up the sound of modern London, Gaika presents a powerful—and political—portrait of the capital.

Extending this sonic omnivorousness is Iranian-Egyptian artist Lafawndah, who has lived in Mexico City, New York and Paris and embraced the sounds she found at every turn. Her EP Tan, released on Warp Records this year, is a record of bold juxtapositions, with her creamy vocals resting uneasily over asymmetrical club beats and global dissonances.    

Taking their name from their hometown of Ramallah, Palestine, Ramallah Collective were formed with the desire to give voice to Palestinian and Arab youth worldwide. Combining field recordings, samples, hip hop beats and Arabic rapping, Ramallah Collective create a complex and defiant performance.

The Brixton-born artist Gaika once rolled with Manchester rap crew Murkage but as a solo artist he’s a new proposition in British music. He dabbles in performance art, costume, masks and movement. He recently collaborated with transgender New York hip-hopper Mykki Blanco and he promises a mixed crowd full of “hood kids, musos, flamboyant queer people and beautiful women” at his live shows.    

Globetrotting singer/producer Yasmine Dubois aka Lafawndah left her job as a gallery curator in Mexico City (where she also played drums in the all-female band Nidada and New York) and moved back to Paris, after previously having studied at La Sorbonne, to concentrate on honing her “ritual club music” influenced by Nina Simone, Grace Jones, Missy Elliot, Kate Bush, traditional Middle Eastern singers, dancehall queens and the Night Slugs label’s modernist take on grime and bass. She has recently been based in Manhattan, where she embodied the role of executive producer by folding the like-minded ADR and L-Vis 1990 into her process to help realize a warped vision of esoteric industrial rhythms fused to an aggressive palate of nomadic atmospherics.  

Muqata'a (aka Boikutt) is a member of Ramallah Collective and a solo musician, MC and producer creating sounds using sampled material, field recordings and electronic devices. Muqata'a released his debut solo album Hayawan Nateq in 2013 and has been dropping singles regularly ever since.  

Masāfāt Music Pass: attend all four Masāfāt music events for £40

Masāfāt is a two-part festival taking place in London and Cairo this September. The festival is designed to create an open-ended, international platform to foster artistic and professional exchange between independent artists and professionals across the Middle East, North Africa and the UK.