Being a Millennial, I was born within the first generation to be raised and nurtured amid the infinite hub of connectivity and creativity that is the Internet.
I’ve watched my music consumption span across an array of methods be it cassette tapes, CDs, Napster, Mp3s, SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes. Thus, like many Millennials I’ve spent most of my life with an electronic mouse in my hand, clicking through life, music, and everything else that crosses my screen.
The effect of this is a click-happy listening style, with applications like SoundCloud and Spotify, it’s easy to find yourself starting to wander off into their infinite, playable encyclopedia of music. Because of this, it’s rare I find myself listening to the entire SoundCloud portfolio of a single artist, and repeatedly at that – there’s a couple handfuls.
And for the past couple years, electronic producer and musician Munma (real name Jawad Nawfal) continues to produce a pretty prolific body of work that you never really have to click-through.
Using a combination of digital equipment and analogue machines, Munma has stacked up an ever-growing number amount of productions since 2006. Over the past 10 years, Munma has produced tracks with several regional artists including El Rass, Mariam Hammoud, Masha, Liliane Chlela in addition to several solo works.
A personal favorite is “Les fleurs du mal” by Mash & Munma (below), the treatment of the vocals has a way of emphasizing the very dark yet relatable lyrics. For a newer track, check out “Words Apart” (above) or Mariam Hammoud & Munma’s “Mou3ad”.
When I asked Munma in a Facebook chat about his choice of collaborators, he responded with this:
“I’m attracted to working with people with the capacity to write and tell stories. It’s not so much about the quality of the vocals, because I know that those can be treated in production and post production if needed. This is why I like to work with people like Mariam Hammoud and Mash, because of their tendency to be very personal and poignant in their writing and in their delivery.”
“This is the stage at which we begin to work together. I don’t usually have a pre-defined idea of what the music will sound like, I compose in tune with the stories that they bring to the table.”
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Mumna on Soundcloud, Facebook.