Dar Disku: There’s a Time and a Place

After introducing dancefloors to the rhythms of south-west Asia, north Africa and their home nation of Bahrain, the Bristol-based label and DJ duo Dar Disku are taking the next step in their perspective-shifting journey with a euphoric debut album of cross-border sounds

“To be on this journey with someone you love and like is a privilege,” Vish Matre, label founder and one half of DJ duo Dar Disku, says, beaming. “We used to watch Glastonbury performances on a dodgy haram iPlayer, and now we’ve played it.”

Vish and Mazen AlMaskati – Maz for short – have been making music together since they were teenagers. Dialling in on Zoom from Croatia, having just arrived to play the Love International festival, the pair are eager to chat about their childhood together, the school bands they were in, and how they grew up in Bahrain and hung out at each other’s homes constantly. Coming from Indian and Bahraini families, they bonded over “a fusion of different cultures” and “finding commonality not just through music, but through food, art and even the language we spoke”.

Music was the constant, though. They were immersed in the rich diversity of styles from across south-west Asia and north Africa, turned on to different sounds, Vish recalls, through “dodgy YouTube clips, tape cassettes and vinyl records passed on from family members”. They’d make, and were gifted, mix CDs; of music downloaded online, or ripped from records brought home by friends from holidays abroad. These cross-border record swaps are how they discovered western artists such as Arthur Russell, Radiohead, Aphex Twin and Daft Punk.

The act of sharing became foundational – the bedrock of their friendship. Maz introduced Vish to Arabic folk and Khaliji music, while Vish passed on his love of Bollywood psychedelia. “CD players and iPods would be shared between the two of us, allowing us to almost sink into each other’s minds at the time,” Vish explains. “It’s here where the almost psychic connection developed – allowing us to pre-empt what would be played next in a set.” When they moved to the UK in 2011, to study law and medicine respectively, they rediscovered music through a new lens: clubbing. Hailing from a Gulf country with a restricted nightlife, the London scene shifted their perception of how audiences can interact with dance music artists in the moment, not just through home listening. “Seeing Benga during our first week in the UK was life-changing,” says Maz excitedly. “It was one of the most important musical moments for us.” 

Switched on by the experience, they set about hitting up London hotspots: Fabric, Village Underground, Catch and the now-shuttered Birthdays in Dalston; they caught the live music bug at festivals like Field Day. “We were hungry for new music every week,” Maz explains. “When you’re in Bahrain, the live music element is missing.” But as clubbing became increasingly central to their lives, they noticed something was lacking: the music they had loved at home was in short supply. In London in the 2010s, it was, Vish says, “a rare occurrence to hear music from across the world”. 

After several years of enduring unfulfilling club nights in search of the sounds they craved – the maqam scales and polyrhythms heard during their childhoods in Bahrain – they took matters into their own hands. In 2019, the pair started Dar Disku – which translates from Arabic to English as “the house of disco” – “to create a space for people that looked and sounded like us,” Maz tells us. Ostensibly a DJ project and label, Dar Disku was ultimately “a space where people from the SWANA (South-west Asian and North African) region and beyond could exist, learn, create and develop. The label was the platform and the DJing aspect was a way to communicate our voice in a way that we felt was the loudest and clearest,” Maz continues. “It soon expanded and became more of a bridge of cultures – from home and away.” 

To ease listeners into their early DJ sets, they would blend “more traditional sounds, which were often harder to digest”, with genres British audiences were already familiar with. These sets inspired the duo to start making their own edits, with their remix of Cheb Mimoune’s Abdel Kader gaining significant traction. Gradually, they found their peers. When artists such as Lebanese-Australian producer DJ Plead, Palestinian heavyweight Sama’ Abdulhadi, Jordan’s Hessle Audio affiliate Toumba and Egyptian experimentalists ZULI and Moktar emerged in the late 2010s, Maz and Vish spotted kindred spirits; artists who were creating diverse sounds and styles by blending the genres of their homelands with western club music. Yet, as DJs, Dar Disku felt that there was still something missing. “Nothing felt risky,” Vish explains, of their own flourishing DJ career. “Things weren’t holding our attention because they weren’t challenging enough.” 

Their debut album, Dar Disku, was the next logical step. Developed over three years between Bahrain, Algeria, Turkey and India, and recorded mainly in Bristol, they worked with collaborators in different cities, squeezing in studio time while touring as DJs. Influences from Egyptian folk, Algerian raï, Ethiopian jazz, Khaliji disco and beyond percolate through the album, as the pair applied the same research-rich approach displayed in their wide-roaming, decades-spanning DJ sets. Indeed, Vish and Maz went so far as to adopt the recording methods and source the vintage gear used to create the records they had loved growing up. The result? An album that sits gloriously out of time – and yet feels vital, fresh. Painstakingly crafted, but full of joy.

There’s another unmissable dimension that helps give shape to the album, too. Vish and Maz looked towards scores from regional cinema as a means to key into a heightened emotional register: “A lot of that comes from the soundtracks of old Iranian or Egyptian cinema,” Maz explains. “It’s often the soundtracks to special moments within films that inspire us; whether it’s heartbreak or celebration, the impact of the music to convey a scene draws us in.” He also points to the track, Alsutur, where the synth work is inspired by Bollywood composer Bappi Lahiri’s earlier work. “When he was going through his psychedelic, darker phase,” Maz says.

For Baar Baar – a funky, shimmering track inspired by Vish’s beloved Bollywood that serves as the album’s centrepiece – they called on Bombay-born disco diva Asha Puthli. The Indian icon’s psychedelic blend of jazz, disco and sensuous pop, which drew on her training in opera and Indian song and dance, made her a star of the 1970s New York scene. Andy Warhol counted her as a muse and she was a headline act at the iconic club, Studio 54. She crossed over in myriad ways: her 1976 single Space Talk was sampled by hip-hop legends like Notorious B.I.G. For Maz and Vish, to be in the studio with her felt like a fever dream. “For half of the studio session, there was no recording done,” Vish says, laughing fondly. “We just wanted to hear her stories!” Puthli regaled them with tales – of meeting Andy Warhol, suing a hip-hop mogul and how “she refused to change her name to please a white music label” – that inspired Vish and Maz to continue down their own path.

The album is, in many ways, a clear culmination of the years spent opening up dancefloors to sounds that had been marginalised and ignored in the west. “That’s gotta be one of the most special things about putting out an album,” Maz says. “Where you go from having these very solitary moments to being lifted out of your bedroom, and a space in your head, to see that it translates to tons of other people.”

“Years of DJing prepares you for making music that people will want to ultimately have some sort of emotional reaction to,” says Vish, heartily agreeing. “A lot of the crowd may not understand a word of Arabic, but they feel the music, and that’s the proof that it works.”