Habibi Funk Records: The Berlin label platforming vintage sounds from the Arabic world
For a decade now, Habibi Funk Records has been digging out old vinyl in niche record stores across Cairo and Beirut to re-release priceless music that had been lost in time.
From Lebanese folk to Libyan reggae, the label has been uncovering buried masterpieces as well as creating music with up-and-coming artists from the Global South, and throwing great parties while doing it.
The label’s co-founder, Jannis Stürtz, also known as DJ Habibi Funk, has been proliferating genres beyond the discos, funk and soul in Europe’s musical appetite. As well as stirring Western audiences into a better understanding of a widely misunderstood region, the label’s re-releases are often discoveries for people in the region themselves.
“Even some of the Lebanese music they put out, some people didn’t know it because it wasn’t well distributed,” Habibi Funk-produced Lebanese musician, Charif Megarbane, told Time, “You have this German label introducing you to the flowers in your own back garden.”
Dusting the shelves of forgotten record shops is exactly how Stürtz got his start, stumbling across a 1972 seven-inch of a Moroccan cover of the UK’s Free hit ‘All Right Now’ in Casablanca, and repressing it in 2015. “When we started the label ten years ago, we felt like we might run out of material,” Stürtz told Hyphen last year, “But the more you spend time with this music from the Arab world, the more you realise there could be 50 labels doing what we’re doing and none of us would ever run out of amazing songs.”
Before re-pressing and re-issuing the record, the Habibi team embarks on a mission to decrypt the whereabouts of the artist in question, who is often either offline or no longer with us. After getting the rights from the artist or the surviving copyright holder, they collect interviews and compose explainers for the context of each record for a booklet issued with it.
“You’re not just reissuing a good song with these tracks,” Habibi Funk’s product manager Fatima Sabouni told Hyphen, “They are artefacts of family heritages and entire cultures…There is so much to discover from just one track.”
Stürtz found that being the bridge to renewed attention for artists is the most rewarding part of running Habibi Funk, but it has not been free of criticism. As a white German man, Stürtz has often been the subject of scrutiny: “We are very aware of our position as a German label dealing with artists in countries with a history of colonisation, and we don’t want to repeat that dynamic,” the exec told Hyphen, adding, “We share profits 50/50… We’re not thinking about grand financial plans at the beginning of each year; instead, we just go from project to project, looking for beautiful music that deserves to be heard.”
The label’s latest release is a collaboration between Megarbane and the Indonesian funk group Ali. Released this month, Tirakat is a perfect embodiment of Habibi Funk’s work: Ali’s blend of Melayu traditions, psychedelic funk and disco grooves from the ’70s meeting Lebanese musical techniques on Western instruments, the album perfectly encapsulates the cyclical motion of mutual inspiration throughout different musical regions.
