Cairo-born, Montréal-based multi-instrumentalist Ash merges the
traditions of his Egyptian and French background into captivating music that has reached millions around the world.
For Ash, Performing at The Pyramids of Giza Marks a Full Circle Moment
The independent artist will be playing live next to the Pyramids of Giza, proving the ability of grassroots art to take over world stages.
I vividly remember the first time I heard Ash’s music. It was 2022 and I was spending a few months in New York, immersing myself in its sprawling SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) diasporic scene, and specifically enjoying Nefertitties, a drag show hosted by Egyptian drag queen Ana Masreya.
One night, Masreya had four men carry her on a pharaonic throne bed through the crowd towards the stage. She was wearing a golden rhinestone dress and the obligatory Nefertiti cap crown. Her grand entrance was magnified by a hypnotizing song of electric guitar loops and oud-like samples over a sweeping synthesizer. I immediately Shazamed it and discovered I was late to Egyptian French musician Ash’s breakout song “Mosaïque.”
While labels had rejected it because they didn’t know how to categorize its fusion of electronic music with Eastern melodies and instruments, “Mosaïque” independently amassed millions of streams online, even before Ash introduced himself to the world with his live video performance at the Great Pyramids of Giza in 2019.
“Growing up, when I started listening to electronic music, it was always Western,” Ash says in an interview with OkayAfrica. “I was really into trance music [but] I always felt like it was missing that cultural element from me. I always had it in me that I wanted to incorporate that.” His first track experimenting with Arab music, which Ash released at the age of 16, was called “Lost,” a deep house production with a Middle Eastern guitar on top of the beat. The kids in his school loved it.
Born in Cairo, Ash moved to Montreal as a university student. He was frequently DJing and producing clubby deep house music when he came up with “Mosaïque,” which was inspired by a longing for the Egyptian sounds he’d begun to miss. “It was on my computer for a year,” he shares. “I was scared to release it until I showed it to a friend a few months later and he was like ‘this track is amazing,’ so I put it out.”
The fear stemmed from a perceived niche that he wasn’t sure people would want to listen to.
“As an artist, you go through a lot of different phases, and I think that phase was wrong,” he says. When he realized that he had to release the music he felt was right, instead of assuming what other people would like, his streams exploded.
“I had reached this point where I wanted to put out music that I liked but that would also test people,” Ash says. “No one ever know[s] what is going to resonate with people. With social media and platforms, the creativity gets overshadowed by the numbers, likes and streams. But at the end of the day, it's music, it's my emotions, it's what came out of me.”
Soon, Ash would be walking in Montreal, stop at a traffic light, and hear the phone of the person next to him ring with the sound of his song. “I’m thinking, ‘oh wow, my track is actually a ringtone,’” he remembers. “But no one knows who the artist behind it is. So I started putting out these videos on YouTube where I play the instruments and the guitar and sax and show that this is how I compose.”
Ash started playing the piano at age six and has since learned whatever else he likes to hear in his songs. “Thank God YouTube exists,” he laughs. “Learning new instruments is frustrating, but I love them so much, and whenever I tried to play them digitally, it never sounded as good as the real thing.” He humbly stresses that he wasn’t classically trained in anything but the piano, but that doesn’t matter in the outcome of his multi-layered music.
In February this year, Ash released his long-awaited debut album Self-Discovery. He’s been touring the world since, selling out venues in Paris, London, New York and Los Angeles. On October 18, the journey that began with his “Mosaïque” video will come full circle with a performance at the Pyramids of Giza.“It's crazy,” he says. “Starting with this video, where I’d never done this before and just wanted to put it out, to now actually be able to perform with people at the Pyramids watching me. I still can’t realize that it's actually happening.”
Ash, who is fully immersed in his creation on stage, loves inviting the audience into his process. “Performing for people is an incredible experience, because I love hearing people be engaged,” he shares. “Even little details, when I see someone's face and eyes move with my movements, and I feel like there is someone interested in what I'm doing and feeling the same thing. Whenever I have an emotional moment, I'm thinking ‘hopefully the audience is also having that emotional moment,’ and it creates this beautiful connection.”
“Performing is a way of giving back the love that I can't always give back online, because it's just not the same thing,” says Ash. He considers it a duty to use his performances and platform to raise awareness about socio-political issues, like fundraising for people affected by the blast in Beirut’s port in 2020, or flying “Free Palestine” banners on his stage. At times, people attack him for speaking out, telling him to focus on making music instead.
“It’s sad,” he says. “As artists, we represent something. [My music] is how I feel about everything, I'll never be able to separate that from my identity.”
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Ash will be playing in Europe, the Middle East, and North America on his Self-Discovery tour.
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