DJ Haram dismantles the club on her debut album “Beside Myself”

“Can I ask you for one favour? I came all the way from New York to come play for you. I would love to see the ladies in the front, please.

That’s what DJ Haram said, deadpan into the mic, right after cutting the music mid-set. No fade. No transition. 

It was June 2024, and I was seeing DJ Haram live for the first time at Cairo Jazz Club. It was her second time performing in Egypt. The room was packed shoulder-to-shoulder, the air thick with sweat. She was deep into a high-octane Jersey club set, flanked by El Kontessa and Azzouni, in a venue that couldn’t have held more than 200 people. Then came the pause. Her voice, calmly asking for the women to come to the front, was when heels started clicking and the baddies pulled through.

A year later, when I sat down with DJ Haram, I brought it up. “Do you prefer big venues or smaller ones?” I asked.

She paused, then replied with:

“It depends. I’ve played festivals for a couple of thousand people, but unless it’s my friends, I kind of prefer bigger rooms. Small rooms feel too intimate, too vulnerable… when it’s “close people”, then sure. But with strangers? It’s hard to connect. And sometimes when it’s just like mad dudes around me??? Like, okay, I want to be inspired. I want to see the cuties. Y’all dudes are weird. Sometimes I’d rather just have that distance.”

DJ Haram, born Zubeyda Muzeyyen in Southern California and raised in New Jersey, hopping across cities, bouncing between rented apartments and shared bedrooms. A non-heteronormative Muslim woman navigating the club circuit. Her early days in music came through noise shows, punk basements, and the long forums of the early internet. She started with sound design before evolving into a DJ and then a producer. In Philadelphia, she became a scene builder, launching inclusive parties like (f)LAWLESS, joining the Discwoman collective, and linking up with Moor Mother to form the noise-rap duo 700 Bliss.

She’s toured the world, scored theatre productions, played punk shows, and taught workshops at Moogfest. But Beside Myself is her debut solo album. Her real coming out and the most inward she’s ever gone.

Across its 14 tracks, Beside Myself feels less like a cohesive album and more like a haunted house built from grief, rage, dissidence, and joy, each track its own room, each with different energies. There’s a room for the bad bitches with ‘fishnets’ and fists raised, a room that plays like an Arab wedding possessed by bass with ‘Deep Breath’, another where the walls echo with inner monologues you never meant to say out loud with ‘Walking Memory’. But no matter which room you walk through, there’s a constant undertone of chaos.

From guttural rap verses and weeping trumpets to hyper-distorted club bangers and ancestral samples, Beside Myself is equally confrontational yet emotionally chaotic. DJ Haram described the years leading up to the record as “struggle, grind solo mode.” The pandemic had tanked her career momentum, money was tight, breakup brutal. She moved into a cockroach-infested apartment with a slumlord, hustled bills however she could, and lost her grip on community. “I was really disconnected. Not very good at reaching out for support.”

And yet, for a record born out of alienation, Beside Myself teems with a lot of collaborations. Haram may joke that she walked a “lonely road” to make it, but along the way she found a band of fellow misfits like Moor Mother, Armand Hammer, Bbymutha, El Kontessa, August Fanon, Kay Drizz, Aquiles Navarro and Abdul Hakim Bilal. It’s unclassifiable but unmistakably hers. A jarring ensemble of rave synths and grungy basslines, shakers and strings, drum machines and samples stitched together with Haram’s poetic lyricism. 

She samples Egyptian feminist writer, activist and physician Nawal El Saadawi from an old academic talk: “Our creativity, our dissidence is killed when we are children”, channelling dissidence into her form into building what she calls “anti-format audio propaganda.” In her world, even the chaos has intention. “Music is a liberation technology,” she says. “A vessel of truth and resistance.”

It’s mid-morning where she is (New York) and nearing dusk in Cairo, where I’m sitting, slightly jetlagged from life itself when I spoke with DJ Haram at what I can only describe as a liminal hour. She’s halfway between finishing an album rollout and trying to leave the house, and I’m halfway between listening to her record for the third time and pretending not to be scared.

Let’s take it from the top, you’ve got Middle Eastern roots, right?

Yeah, I’m a first-generation American; my parents are both immigrants from Turkey of Circassian and Syrian ancestry. 

So yeah, it’s layered.

What got you into music?

Um… I think I’ve always been into music. I liked music more than other art forms. But I never really thought it was something I could do. I just really enjoyed listening to it. I tried to join a school band when I was in the fifth grade, but it was all boys, and my dad didn’t want me to do it. 

So I didn’t.

But I think that’s why I started DJing. Because DJing was an easy in, where you just play music. You don’t need to know how to play an instrument, and I’ve always liked technology and gear. So once I started getting into synthesizers, and using Ableton, and different DJ tools, I was like, OH, I like this. The computer side of making music, the programming side, is easier than picking up a guitar or just more natural to me than picking up a guitar.

And what do you listen to now? Doesn’t have to be current, just what’s in your orbit.

But I’ve been listening to a lot of Doechii. Because she’s fab. I love that song she did for Westside Gunn ‘EGYPT (Remix)’ and when I heard that I was like, I’m the only person in this underground rap world that’s actually putting bad bitches on the beat and making this kind of product, you know? Because when Doechii and Westside Gunn do it, they’re making like a product, a lot of money got put into them to bring them to that point. Whereas I’m, like, bootstrapping it. As they say. So I really like that song.

I’ve also been listening to a lot of older club music lately. Like KW Griff. I’m playing a show with Rod Lee… that’s kind of why. So I’ve been getting in my OG bag. Boo Man. A bunch of people from Baltimore.

I used to listen to music all the time when I was DJing primarily. But now that I’m making music just as much as I’m DJing so I really listen to my own stuff or my collaborators’ stuff.

I’m working on a couple of projects where I’m just always sending stuff back and forth with people. 

Was the album title ‘Beside Myself’ inspired by going solo on this album? 

Yeah… so, I’m from the New York area and had been there a lot DJing from Philly, ’cause it’s not far. But since it was the pandemic, a lot of my friends in New York didn’t even know I had moved here. People were staying home and shit.

I moved into this place that had a slumlord and a huge cockroach problem. I was just trying to get my bills paid. I was really in like “struggle grind solo mode” and super disconnected from the community. And I wasn’t very good at reaching out for support, either.

So Beside Myself is being really on my own. But also, it means being beside yourself with rage. And that was me. Like, the primary source of life inside me was just being pissed off. That was the only fire I had. There was no burning love, no passion, just that.

But what inspired the choice of words was how I’ve always associated the phrase “beside herself” in vintage American media in the 1950s to 70s. It’s how women, or non-heteronormative people, would describe a kind of overload. Like: “She’s beside herself!” Like you’re so overwhelmed by emotion or grief that you’re no longer whole.

That resonated with me, feeling alienated, isolated, and yet… overstimulated by my own thoughts. Like, I need a break from my own head. That’s what the imagery was aiming to show.

But then, it’s also kind of a joke, too, because in order to actually make the album, I brought in a lot of collaborators (laughs). So it’s like, okay, very funny, “beside yourself”… but there’s like eight people beside you on the record. 

I noticed how the opening track feels intense, distorted, stuck in your head until someone rings the bell and snaps you out of it. But the closing track feels a bit celebratory. Was that contrast intentional?

Yeah.

This album is definitely a journey. A pretty non-linear one. With several beginnings and several endings. And depending on the sequence, that story could be laid out differently.

I had Billy Woods (one of the rappers from Armand Hammer) help me with the sequencing. He runs his own label, Backwoods Studioz, and he always told me he’s good at sequencing records. He helps artists on his label sequence their stuff, so I trusted him to help me put it together.

Walking Memory was intentionally designed to be an intro. You know how in a music video, sometimes they’ll have a little skit at the beginning before the song? That’s what I wanted. Like you’re entering the world before the music starts. You’re at the club and you can hear the music in the distance, but first, they’re checking your bag and taking your money.

And Deep Breath was always the ending?

Honestly, I was just playing around in Ableton with different VSTs. There are a lot of regional wind instruments in Central Asian, West Asian, and North African music that sound like bagpipes, you know? I was trying to get that sound, somewhere between a bagpipe and a ney.

The way I was putting in the drums at the beginning — in kind of a dissonant way — I don’t know what I was on emotionally, but the whole intro felt like it was for a funeral.

Like, this is just me hearing something and following it. But also… I’m a musician, and I have agency. If I die tomorrow, I want people to know to play this song at my funeral.

It felt like an ending. That’s why I changed the title to Deep Breath (An Ending).

Culturally, I’m assuming you’re Muslim, and we don’t party at funerals. Some cultures do, like a celebration of life. But we don’t. In my family, if you’re immediate family, how you grieve is up to you. But if you’re an extended family, you have responsibilities. You’ve got to cook, take care of the people grieving, and plan the funeral. Death is part of a cycle that includes life.

There’s an obvious contrast between your voice and Dakn’s in the second track, Remaining. Yours feels more like a whispered poem, while his has an evil, processed vocal undertone. Was that contrast intentional? 

I think so. Also, I’m so honoured that you’re such a deep listener. Thank you for listening. Seriously.

(Some journalists do not. They do not care as much.)

Dakn is a rapper, and he’s picky about his beats. He and his crew are pretty inspired by US sample culture — 404s, MPCs, looping four bars, adding effects, more on the minimal side. On the other hand, I make crazy loud stuff. So it took a minute to figure something out together.

The trumpet on that track is by my friend Aquiles Navarro — he’s a jazz musician — and it inspired me to recite a poem. I put my poem at the beginning and showed it to Dakn. I don’t even remember why. I think he was asking me for more stuff with less drums, so I gave him this, which has no drums.

Were you playing with different energies through the bilingual delivery?”

We went back and forth a little on the vocal effects. I pitched his voice down and gave it those dark undertones. For him, it was kind of like, “let’s make your voice bigger and deeper.” Mine was more raw and gentle. I was trying to do this ASMR-y thing.

But yeah. That’s part of the magic of collaboration. You make stuff, and it’s just… cool.

You kept that vocal tone consistent on the next track too…

I’m still figuring it out. I don’t really know how to be a vocalist, but I’m working on it.

It’s working. Fishnets is for the bad bitches, right?

That’s right. As simple as that.

I was listening and thinking, “The lyrics are actually mad deep.” But the girls who get it, get it.

Exactly. It’s for the girls. It’s for the car stereo. For the girls. (laughs)

What’s the story behind “Sahel”? Is this a reference to Egypt’s North Coast?

El Kontessa and I went together, and some of the recordings in the song are literally from when we were there. Like the beach, little sounds… just stuff from that trip.

It was last year. I played with her at that gig, yeah. She did a kind of hybrid set. We want to be booked together more. We’ve been playing around for fun, but we’d love to take it further.

It was her idea for the name. The song, to me, could’ve been a three-track EP on its own. But we were just kicking it so hard when I was in town that it kind of became a snow globe.

What made you lean into the album’s consistently dark undertones?

A lot of music (mine too sometimes) deals with heavy, dark shit, but tries to redeem it by being hot. You know, sexy vocals, money flexes, catchy breakdowns.

But I’m also drawn to stuff that’s just unappealingly dark. No filter, no glam, no “cool” edge. Just noise and feelings. This track has no vocals and no breakdown. It’s just raw sound design like cinematography.

So, how do you know when a track (or an album) is done?

You don’t. You just… stop.

Once you hand it in, once it’s on wax, that’s it. You did what you did.

Actually, the last thing added to the album was a quote at the end of “Who Needs Enemies.” My friend Archangel sent me a voice note: “Girl, that billionaire does not know you and is not your oomf, stand the fuck up.” A day before I submitted the final version. I threw it in. One last change. That’s how it goes.

Some tracks I’ll call done when it’s just one drum loop. People are like, “That’s it??” But I’m like, Yeah? It’s cool, right? That’s why I need collaborators to help balance that instinct.

What was behind your decision to support the cultural boycott, like the open boycott letter you signed against Sonar Festival, and how do you see the role of artists in political moments like this?

I wasn’t initially going to perform at Sonar this year, but I have played there in the past. But Dunia, an Iraqi artist based in Barcelona, was really central in organising the boycott. To be honest, it wasn’t that deep of a decision for me. If BDS is asking to pressure Sonar, that’s a good idea. Culture, tech, private equity, and military AI are all being mobilised right now to support what Israel is doing. I think it’s important to attack from every possible angle.

A lot of people get stuck on “What’s the best tactic?” Like: I’ll only do it if it’s guaranteed to work. But to me, engaging in that moment, with whatever leverage we have—that’s enough reason. We need to be doing more things like this.

And yeah, Primavera, Sonar, and Boiler Room all have had ties to Zionist institutions or investors. It’s the dehumanising part of this industry. I’ve spent my whole life surrounded by people who care more about the Holocaust and antisemitism than they do about the atrocities we’re funding right now.

So now that people are finally mad? Cool. Let’s actually be mad. Let’s do something. It’s the bare minimum.

Last one: What’s coming up next for you?

I’m going on tour!

I’m building a new live set based on the album, with visuals too.

Also, there’s a music video on the way. Hopefully dropping with the album or right after, depending on how long it takes. I don’t edit, so it’s… in God’s hands now.

I’m making more music with Shawre (from Fishnets), with Moor Mother, with Armand Hammer… and some shows will be collaborative sets. Like, with Achilles the trumpet player at Le Guess Who. And with Dakn in Berlin, we’re gonna do an improv set together and some rapper sets too, hopefully.