Aya Metwalli, Egyptian Sound Composer: "Conjuring Spirits"

We open this episode meeting Aya Metwalli in Bierut, just a three-weeks after her performance at ECLAT Neue Musik Festival, Stuttgart, accompanied by Tony Elieh. We hear about the audience and their 40-minute improvised set. Interestingly, Aya opened with an interpretation of an Oum Kulthum lyric. This brings an intriguing conversation about conjuring spirits. Aya states she enjoys “singing songs from the past that is not only an ode but also a grievance or funeral; these are things that still exist.” I agree the music of (Oum Kulthum) somehow refers to a “death of self.” The rest of the set consisted of vocals, electronics, and Tony’s electric bass. The compositions were born from ideas based on melody, chaos, and even ugliness. Aya not only called up Oum Kulthum’s spirit, but also other impressionable folklore. She said her methodology was to create a “ritualistic” track. Thankfully the performance was recorded and will be included on an upcoming album. We talk more about the “ritualistic” concept. Aya describes it as how she interprets something today; “tapping into her insides, back to a holy.” And how she portrays ugliness in her music. This is a fascinating answer, Aya reassures me; her interpretation of ugly is distorted dissonance out of the norm: “it taps into some part of you that other people may not want to welcome.”

Aya Metwalli (1988) is an Egyptian singer/songwriter, composer, and sound artist based in Beirut. She grew up in Cairo, where her father would play non-stop Oum Kalthoum songs on road trips to the beach. Her mother, known to have the most beautiful voice in the family, always sang at home and in gatherings with family and friends, and long before she was able to form her music taste, Aya was fed immense amounts of Arabic classic songs and melodies that now lie on a bed of velvet inside her subconscious mind.

Aya started fiddling with the upright piano they had at home around four. Soon after, she got her first solo singing gig on the preschool stage and continued practicing the piano and performing Arabic song repertoires throughout her school years. At seventeen, she bought her first guitar and self-learned the instrument while getting her bachelor’s degree in English literature. She posted cover songs on YouTube, slowly gathering a growing online fan base. Soon after, she wrote and composed her original songs on the acoustic guitar until she studied music production in 2014 in Cairo and stretched out her sound. She self-released her debut EP "Beitak," toward the end of 2016 and has been revamping her sound and developing her modus operandi since.

Described as “a musical enigma” by The Guardian and a musician who has "crafted a spellbinding brand of anti-pop" by Pitchfork, Aya uses analog synthesizers to produce gritty textures and strange, unsettling soundscapes. She sings heavily influenced by Arabic pop and classic melodies. She modulates her voice with electronics to delve even deeper into a world of eeriness, using heavy drones and drum machines to create a distorted, industrial body of sound crocheting noise with melody.

Over the past few years, she has performed solo live sets at Tectonics Festival in Greece, Norberg festival in Sweden, La Magnifique Avant-Garde in France, Irtijal Festival in Lebanon, played with the Lebanese free-rock powerhouse trio Calamita at the CTM festival and Die Akademie der Künste Berlin, been featured in Nicolas Jaar’s "sound- and light installation: Retaining the Energy, but Losing the Image" at Het HEM in the Netherlands, and ULTIMA Oslo Contemporary Music Festival in September 2022. Aya composed for and performed with the contemporary vocal ensemble Neue Vocalsolisten in the framework of the ECLAT Contemporary Music Festival Stuttgart in February 2021 -  2022. In 2023, she returned to the ECLAT festival to do a 40-minute improvised set with Tony Elieh and performed at Bern Jazz Festival Switzerland. 

At present, Aya is working on her debut LP album and is further exploring live performance, continuing to incorporate theatricality into her shows.