Kiss Facility pry open a treasury of longing in debut ‘Khazna’

The pairing of Emirati-Egyptian singer-poetess Mayah Alkhateri and producer-prodigy Salvador Navarrete (better known as Sega Bodega) has, until now, existed in a state of productive in-betweenness. Too textural and adventurous for pop, too digitally mangled with all its cybersigilism to sit comfortably in any shoegaze revivalist drawer, even if that is the label most attached to them.

Coming off 2023’s Esoteric EP, a debut that serves as a séance more than anything, the duo have spent the past two years exploring adjacent worlds, releasing music under Navaratte’s independent label Ambient Tweets. They opened for Erika de Casier on the European leg of her 2024 tour, reimagined Haifa Wehbe’s syrupy classic Malket Gamal El Kowan as if it were beamed in from a collapsing satellite, and found their sonic DNA twirling through a sample on Fred again.. and Skepta’s 21 Years. The throughline isn’t so obvious, but arguably that is what makes the band so refreshing in an Arabic music landscape that is constantly fronting newness on the surface while concealing tired pastiche under that thin cloak. Their sound flirts with underground electronics and Arab diva camp alike. On paper and in practice, it is a thrill to watch.

With KHAZNA (“treasure,” or “vault” in Arabic), Kiss Facility’s debut full-length album, the duo invite the listener into an immersive sonic chamber. Alkhateri’s mythic, incantatory voice carries Arabic poetry layered over shoegaze haze, IDM, indie rock, and flickers of club minimalism courtesy of Navarrete’s future-facing electronic sensibilities.

The record doesn’t embrace shoegaze so much as pulls it apart. The hallmarks are there, but recombined into something way more interesting. Navarrete has called the process a “free for all,” scrapping anything that fell too neatly into what a Kiss Facility track is supposed to sound like. For listeners curious about what Arabic lyricism steeped in epic, wandering poetics might sound like suspended over ghostly vocal chops and shimmering guitar lines, KHAZNA delivers exactly that kind of disorientation. It will slip out of your grasp, no matter how closely you’ve followed the Kiss Facility or Sega Bodega canon.

“It has to be two worlds meeting,” he insists, “rather than me going into her world or her coming into my world.” That space between Alkhateri’s instinctive Arabic penmanship and penchant for hypnotic melody, and Navarrete’s restless electronic production, is at the core of the vault’s pulsating engine. Not Arabic music filtered through Western production, nor Western experimentalism decorated with Arabic vocals. It forms a self-contained universe, a khazna lined with longing, devotion, and lust, each laid down like an offering at the altar of their meeting point.

For Alkhateri, Arabic is the album’s spine. “The Arabic language describes my personal feelings in a love language I know best. I cannot find that in any other language,” she explains.  She knows the rules; her studies in classic poetics are on display here. Knowing the rules, however, doesn’t mean following them. “I hate constraints, like the idea that you have to sing [a certain way]… the album has hidden meanings that I cannot express directly.” To its favour, the album’s themes don’t rush to openly declare themselves. The recurring fixation on eyes turns the record into something watchful and watched, invoking nazar, protection, recognition, the unsettling intimacy of “I’ve seen you in a past life” – mysticism to the highest aesthetic degree.

Poetry threads through the record, only becoming fully distinguishable when Alkhateri’s voice purposefully rises over the often thick mix to deliver release. Absent From My Eyes orbits a couplet Egyptian poet Mahmoud Mohamed Shaker once quoted at the opening of his introduction to Hayat al-Rafi‘i. It surfaces through the haze: “والعين تبصر من تهوى وتفقده.” The eye sees what it loves and registers the loss in the same blink. Then the vows, stark and load-bearing: “عمري معاك.” “كلي فداك.” In the track’s closing minute, her voice performs its alchemy once again, cutting through the mix with a register we have never heard from her before. Close your eyes and it sounds like a nasheed refracted through chrome, devotional and sharpened to a metallic blade. “ We had finished the song and we’re sending it to be mastered. And literally like 10 minutes before I sent it to [Heba Kadry] for mastering, I felt like Mayah had stayed in one vocal range for too long. It didn’t really go anywhere for me. So I asked [her] to sing as loud as she could for five minutes straight,” Navarrete recalls.

Noon leans further into the electronics, reworking lines from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s State of Siege – written during the 2002 Israeli siege of Ramallah – into a story of two souls imagining what they might become in the afterlife: a stone, a bird, a tree. The lyrics are sparse, but the ghostly synths do the summoning while Alkhateri hovers over them with a spectral delivery. Ishara, featuring Turkish popstar Aleyna Tilki, also shares similar reflections on death and the afterlife.

Flesh Mix, on the other hand, plunges into the corporeal. The track unfolds like an epic odyssey through lust. It opens with a surging guitar, before giving way to a chorus where Alkhateri’s voice burns with longing, repeating the refrain, “انت عمري وانت قلبي الخالي” – you are my life, and you are my empty heart. It’s almost feverish, as though the song itself is chasing the limits of its own appetite. In a record steeped in poetry and spiritual residue, Flesh Mix insists on the body. It stands alongside Kotshena as one of the album’s most electrifying peaks.

Kotshena’s rush folds Kraftwerkian austere minimalism into trap flickers and jagged soaring rock breaks. Over it, Alkhateri taps into something knowingly diva-esque. She sings of scenting her hair with bukhoor at dawn, of being beautiful and content. Lyrics and attitude right out of the Haifa Wehbe and Sherine school of pop self-mythology:
“انا طول عمري حلوة سعيدة / زي القمرة و بالي طويل /
انا بس نفسي العب كوتشينة / على حجرة و تفاحتين”

It’s disarmingly playful and catchy as hell, and Navarrete’s “favourite by far” in his entire catalogue. The track smuggles an uncharacteristic euphoria not found anywhere else on the tracklist.

The closing track, Flux carries a near-unbearable yearning. Its closing strings echo Plasma, the first single released, folding the album back onto itself and coming full circle. Here, Alkhateri’s unflinching encounter with fragility is characteristic of her rebellious spirit, rejecting the inherited instruction, so familiar in Arab life, to endure in silence.

In the duo’s Dazed MENA Issue 02 cover story, she spoke openly about the pressures placed on Arab women to remain composed and to survive without ever appearing wounded. Flux takes that exposure and baptises it in tenderness and ache. The suffering is sanctified. It’s a sentiment that sharpens the entire record in retrospect. The vault crack opens under the weight of what it holds, but does not fall apart entirely.

In many ways, the duo’s first full-length offering is a rebellion against purity, against the idea that an Arabic singer must sing in one dialect or one tone, or that “alternative” Arabic music should sound like one thing. Call it Arabic shoegaze if you must. But on KHAZNA, Alkhateri and Navarrete sound like genre saboteurs, blurring the lines until all that’s left is a haunting, strangely luminous sensation – and the result is marvellous.