Following his involvement in Tai Shani’s The Spell or The Dream at Somerset House, Mo’min Swaitat of the Palestinian Sound Archive tells Rob Corsini about how the project is preserving Palestine’s musical and cultural history

Growing up in a Palestinian Bedouin family, music was around Mo’min Swaitat from a young age. Gatherings, weddings, and evenings in living rooms were spent listening to music, often played by Swaitat’s family – many of whom were musicians themselves. This music wasn’t just for entertainment though; it also functioned as a collective cultural archive. “Living in a Palestinian Bedouin family is quite often haunting,” Swaitat says. “In a good way – there’s a story that follows us.”

Swaitat moved to London in 2011, but in 2020 found himself stranded back in his hometown of Jenin in the West Bank, unable to return to the UK due to coronavirus lockdowns. During the eight months he spent back in Palestine, he had space to reflect on that music that had shaped him. “I found that there was a lot of my identity to do with going into weddings and hearing those sounds,” he recalls.

As he tried to connect further with this, Swaitat went to an old record shop that was run by a friend of his family. “I wasn’t just a naive person knocking on a record store, trying to find good sounds,” he remembers. “I went there coming from deeply rooted family heritage and culture, knowing that most of my family’s recordings were going to be there, knowing that [the shopkeeper] himself would have accompanied my family to weddings and made recordings.”

Exploring the shop, Swaitat discovered thousands of cassettes – covered in dust but well preserved – spanning decades and genres. Recognising that the collection was a vital part of Palestine’s cultural history, one that was at risk of being lost, he bought the majority of them then and there. These cassettes, alongside others later collected from across Palestine, now form the basis of the Palestinian Sound Archive – a record label and cultural research platform devoted to preserving Palestine’s musical history. Through digitising, re-releasing, and playing this collection on his monthly NTS show, Swaitat has brought new attention to the struggle and resistance captured in their sounds, the revolutionary lyrics that speak in defiance of the barbarity of imperialism, and the percussive beats that accompany them, designed for collective dance.

In the five years that it’s been running the archive has affected many people, but the tapes’ first listener was Swaitat. As he first made his way through his newfound collection he was thrown back into memories from his childhood. “It’s impossible to escape what we as Palestinians were subjected to by the Israeli military, the colonial state, and Zionism,” he says. “The Zionist agenda is to terrorise Palestinian youth in order to strip them down.” The violence that Swaitat grew up around had a corrupting energy, he realised, not only persecuting Palestinians, but also tainting their memories of joy.

“My beautiful archive as a kid – remembering all of these weddings – was replaced with a terrible archive, of encountering the military machine,” recalls Swaitat. His memories of the everyday happiness of domestic life and his community had been distorted, he says, as the traumatic aspects of growing up under Israeli occupation – seeing parents beaten in front of their children, being followed home by the police, and having friends arrested and sent to jail – consumed his memory. Through listening to the tapes, though, Swaitat began to unlock those more joyful memories. “It helped me to rehabilitate and refine my beautiful archive – and many of those memories are the most beautiful memories for me.”

Swaitat wanted to give others the opportunity to experience this reconfiguration of memory – and so he created the Majazz Project, under which the Palestinian Sound Archive operates. “My dream was to create a platform run by Palestinians that amplifies and celebrates Palestinian music. That was very clear.” Swaitat’s goal was to foster a wider listenership by releasing remasters of the cassettes, mainly on vinyl. While others working with overlooked music histories were interested in sampling or remixing, however, Swaitat cared more about faithful restorations. “I wanted the Palestinian sound exactly how it was created.”

The Palestinian Sound Archive’s first vinyl release was The Intifada 1987, a recording by Riad Awwad, his sister Hanan Awwad, and Mahmoud Darwish, a renowned writer who was seen as Palestine’s national poet. The cassette was recorded during the First Intifada – an uprising of the Palestinian people against Israel which took place between 1987 and 1993. Although over 3,000 copies of the original cassette were made, they were banned and systematically confiscated by the Israeli authorities soon after its release, leaving the recording almost impossible to find.

As Swaitat prepared to re-release the album in 2021, he spoke with Hanan Awwad and learnt about the conditions under which the album was made – musicians gathering in Riad’s living room in the first week of the uprising, with Darwish performing improvised spoken word. “That got me to understand that the sound is not the only thing that’s important,” says Swaitat, “The story of the making of those albums is as important.”

Swaitat believes the context of a recording’s creation bears increased importance because of the targeted erasure that Israel has enforced. “Palestinians have been almost completely cut off from so many of our stories,” he says. Many of the records in the archive have direct political messages – like the Palestinian Black Panthers’ Mixtape, which features field recordings of resistance fighters who were training in the forests around Jenin – but even those without those overt themes speak to wider Palestinian experience. “A lot of our artwork was stolen and confiscated by Israel – which is another part of destroying the Palestinian mentality and Palestinian nervous system, by deliberately targeting our culture.”

While many records of Palestinian life have been destroyed, surviving music provides a unique lens into what people were experiencing. Or as Swaitat puts it, “listening to Palestinian music is listening to what Palestinians have gone through, because Palestinian sound accompanies the tragedy of what Palestinians have been through.” It is for this reason he believes that Palestinian music developed such a specific sound; with music released before the establishment of Israel in 1948 being comparable to other music from the Levant, and diverging after that date. “You can feel the integration of the sadness of what happened. The sound completely changed.”

In the years that followed, many Palestinian artists and musicians were forced into exile or refugee camps, while those who remained clung to heritage; improvised lyrics, which had always featured in Palestinian music, became more barbed – with songs themed around the dream of nationhood, the struggle for land, and heroes and martyrs. Traditional instruments – like the oud, qanun, mijwiz, arghul, and tabla – remained central to the sound. Rapid beats provided the background to mournful laments, which were sung in the Arabic maqam – a melodic system that utilises microtones as smaller steps between notes.

In the 1970s, a new genre popularised by a singer named Mustafa Al-Kurd emerged. Called ‘committed singing’, his music would serve as anthems for Palestinian liberation. Al-Kurd sang in clear Jerusalemite dialect, with lyrics like “Give me the plough and the sickle, and never leave your land.” After his music became known to the authorities, Al-Kurd was arrested multiple times, committed to detention, and eventually forced into exile.

Although Swaitat’s archive mainly contains music from the 1960s and 1970s, it also has tapes dating back as early as the 1930s. One cassette contains songs by a Palestinian revolutionary singing in a café in Haifa, protesting the British Mandate that placed Palestine under colonial rule from 1920 to 1948. These early tapes in the archive show the robust culture that existed in Palestine before it was subjected to violence. At that time Palestine was seen as a cosmopolitan destination with universities, events, film festivals – and a thriving live music scene. One of the musical hubs was Jaffa, on the Mediterranean coastline, which was home to a record label and pressing plant called Baidaphon. In the 1940s, however, most of the label’s machinery and output was seized. “They actually used the equipment made by this record label to record [David] Ben-Gurion’s announcement of the establishment of Israel.” Swaitat says, “From there, you can understand the confiscation of Palestinian art and music.”

While sadness and storytelling are essential to the beauty of Palestinian music, the Palestinian Sound Archive found that it also made their release strategy more complex. “In the music industry there’s an existing idea of Arab music. It has to be exotic – sort of a disco-y, dancey, funky vibe – in order for people to buy it,” Swaitat says. “People want to have naked women on the beach in Lebanon, saying ‘habibi, habibi’ in Arabic, and ‘I love you’ in English”. This version of Arab music had become popular among certain segments of Europe’s hipster club landscape, but Swaitat could see this wasn’t what his archive contained. “What I’m working with is patriotic poetry, it’s revolutionary sound.”

It was only after reading Edward Said’s Orientalism – a book which argues that the West’s portrayal of Asia and North Africa is inherently tied to imperialist power structures – that Swaitat could fully articulate the importance of his work. “I was able to say, ‘No, what we’re doing is great. It’s not about glamourising and making this exotic to young audiences. This is about preserving Palestinian heritage and culture.’” But while Swaitat was assured of the archive’s qualities, it also brought forward a realisation: in an industry that often sought to glamourise Arabic music, there was little interest in promoting music that reflected the true, often dystopic, reality that Palestinians have endured and that can be found within their music

For the archive, presenting a true picture of the struggles encapsulated within Palestinian music was made even more important after Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, which followed the Hamas attacks of October 7. In the two years since, at least 78,000 Palestinian citizens have been killed, more than half of whom were women and children, in an act the United Nations – among numerous other organisations – has described as genocide. In addition, nearly 70 per cent of the civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip has been destroyed or damaged. “I feel like I’ve done a great thing to have brought the cassettes with me [to London] in light of what’s happening now.” Swaitat says. “They might have been lost or damaged.”

Since 2023, the archive has released expressly political recordings that speak to the violence faced by Palestine. These include compilations that honour Land Day (which commemorates the killings of six Palestinian civilians who were protesting Israeli land seizure) and Prisoners Day (which serves as a tribute to the sacrifice of Palestinian prisoners in their fight for liberation). Their next release will exclusively feature Palestinian singers, songwriters, and composers who were killed by the Israeli Defence Forces.

Many of the artists found within the Palestinian Sound Archive have been killed or displaced since their recordings were made, and the archive functions as one of the only records of their contributions to Palestinian history. While the job of preservation is a cause Swaitat cares deeply about, he believes this is about posterity over education. “I want to make it clear that I do not feel responsible toward the Western narrative of information. It is not my responsibility to make young, privileged people who have access to everything aware,” says Swaitat, “I feel responsible toward myself and toward my people, towards my own story, to preserve it.”

In the future, Swaitat hopes that the archive will be able to establish a physical space in Palestine, where people will be able to explore the sounds, history, lyrics, and philosophy of Palestinian music – but he also hopes that the archive will bring about creative and artistic possibilities for Palestinians.

Swaitat recently part in Tai Shani’s exhibition The Spell Or The Dream, at Somerset House. As part of the show, Shani created The Dream Radio in which she asked artists to tell stories of dreams which imagine an optimistic future. (You can find a short film featuring Shani discussing the project’s philosophy and themes here, via Somerset House’s Channel space). Swaitat hopes that the tapes in the Palestinian Sound Archive will also help others to imagine lives that are free from violence.

Swaitat’s dream in the exhibition speaks to a powerlessness that he felt during his time growing up in Jenin. “Living in a place where your hometown is being bombed every day and night doesn’t leave you with anything as a kid. And during the day, you are not in control of your dreams anymore,” Swaitat says. But through archive’s music, which allowed him to reframe his own personal archive and recentre the beautiful memories from his childhood, Swaitat was able reframe that powerlessness – to imagine a dream in which he was in control. “To sleep and to close your eyes, this is where you become your own hero. Where you can be capable and able to be anything you want.”

You can find a short film on Dream Architecture featuring Somerset House Studios’ artist Tai Shani, which underpins the the thinking behind The Spell Or The Dream here, via Somerset House’s curated online film/podcast/art space, Channel