DJ Haram Breaks Down Eight Perfectly Produced Songs From Around the World

The Producers is an interview series where our favorite producers discuss their favorite music production. 

What does it mean to create music while the world is crumbling around you? This is a question DJ Haram has spent her entire career figuring out. As the child of Turkish immigrants growing up in northern New Jersey, she was as immersed in radical politics as she was in Middle Eastern music, hip-hop, and Jersey club. In the early 2010s, Haram, born Zubeyda Muzeyyen, moved to Philadelphia, where she began organizing with Occupy Wall Street and took on DJing in earnest. She spent the rest of the 2010s refining her craft, collaborating with Philly-based musician and poet Moor Mother in the duo 700 Bliss and working with the Discwoman collective before moving back up north to Brooklyn. Haram has accomplished so much in the last decade and change—world tours, her own zine, production for Armand Hammer and Ghais Guevara—it’s shocking to think that Beside Myself, her album, mixing beats, sound design, and raps from a handful of guests and herself, is her first solo full-length ever.

Years’ worth of musical ideas and frustrations over anti-Arab sentiment—being tokenized on festival bills and censored in interviews while talking about Palestine—power much of Beside Myself. “I tell people the intention of my work is trying to make being actually rebellious and doing subversion cool again,” she explains. “We’re in this really apathetic and nonchalant era of ‘Don’t try! Make it look like someone caught you on surveillance.’ I actually try so hard and I feel like I’m cringe a lot. I think about this Zora Neale Hurston quote often: ‘If you’re silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.’ I feel like people are really gonna get it twisted if I don’t straight-up tell them.”

Muzeyyen communicates this sentiment across Beside Myself. “I coulda been this world’s thickest eco-terrorist / But I’m in the green room drunk looking for cannabis / My ’fit not shit next to all this / But all y’all are on my guestlist,” she deadpans on “Distress Tolerance,” one of the few times she puts her own voice on the album. It manifests musically, too—with the Turkish zurna swirling around club drums on the Armand Hammer-featuring single “Stenography,” and the Iranian kamancheh presiding over the marching rhythm of “Voyeur.” Other times, her synths and 808s tremble in the distance as guests like El Kontessa, Bbymutha, and Sha Ray flaunt their shit and speak on the resistance. Beside Myself is a powerful statement drawing from every corner of Muzeyyen’s life and identity, one that will have you shaking your hips while you’re racking your brain. 

Below, Haram discusses eight songs that have inspired her as a producer, from rap and club to math rock and Middle Eastern orchestral, and everything in between.

Yasiin Bey (FKA Mos Def): “Quiet Dog Bite Hard”

Producer: Preservation

This is one of the first relatively underground hip-hop records I got into that was of this quality. It’s also one of the more explicitly political contemporary pieces of music I was into. It felt like this record was trying to agitate people in a certain direction. Politics are just as popular as TMZ or other celebrity bullshit, and [“Quiet Dog Bite Hard”] had meaning and purpose in a way I thought was really cool. 

I first listened to this in high school when I wasn’t a full-on music nerd. I was into going to shows and stuff, but I wasn’t a scene person, really. I was more into politics and organizing and communism and shit. I never expected that with this record I listened to in high school, I would one day be on the same record as Preservation [both have production on Armand Hammer’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips] and realize ‘Oh, your production style definitely influenced mine.’ I also love the way he utilizes non-Western samples in a natural, organic way. It doesn’t sound like the National Geographic of beats. He tried to learn the instrument, in a way, and I think a lot of my music sounds like that, too. 

Lotic: “Heterocetera”

Lotic is one of my early favorite experimental electronic producers. She is from Texas, but she’s been in Berlin for a while now. We’ve never collabed before, but I think we’ve maybe played on a lineup or two. She was already putting out productions when I was first starting to DJ. It’s just a really small world of people who come from a queer nightlife context that also make experimental electronic music like this. I would compare her music to somebody like Arca or Net Gala from Seoul, South Korea. It’s just a lotta Venn diagrams and overlaps in that small world, but I feel like she’s Mother. I think she’s a much better producer than Arca, no shade. We’re talking about two GOATs, two mothers, but I like what Lotic puts forth. She’s the pinkprint in this lane. 

Where did Lotic’s influence specifically pop up on Beside Myself? 

When I first heard her stuff, she introduced me to this aesthetic of complicated sound design and becoming an expert at playing the computer and synthesizers. I’ve always been attracted to weird music, like experimental rock or hip-hop with weird samples; but Lotic really takes it to the next level where it could be a soundtrack but then she brings in club elements to make it more musical. I feel like that’s in all my stuff. “Voyeur” has a similar vibe—if I never brought the drums in and kept all the other design, it’d be very foreboding. She’s more cunt than me. I struggle to be cunt and to serve it. People really want me to serve it, but here’s what I got: “Stenography” featuring Armand Hammer [laugh].

Ryuichi Sakamoto: “Solitude”

I didn’t get into his work much until he passed, and then I started watching concerts of his. Before he passed, I had already tried to start learning how to play piano. I’ve always been drawn to the keys, but I had more exposure to synths through the scenes I was in. I never made the connection before because most of the time, when people are playing synths, they’re playing a note or two, or a chord—they’re not going in like a concert pianist, so it was almost unrelated in my head. But I’ve always been drawn to playing things on keys. When I discovered Sakamoto, I was like "Oh wow, look at this GOAT, look at this master of the craft, this is so dope."

He’s definitely an inspiration for “Who Needs Enemies When These Are Your Allies?” I’ve really been trying to learn by ear and playing what sounds and feels good, and “Who Needs Enemies” is a relatively simple song. I couldn’t write out what it is and I feel like I probably couldn’t play it out live, but I would definitely work on memorizing it to keep working on it and get a decent recording on it. 

Ryuichi Sakamoto  makes such emotive music. He’s also done a fair amount of sound design and scoring as well, which requires thinking about music differently than I normally do. It’s more of the studio mindset, a working artist mindset than just an entertainer or public-facing artist. I’m very inspired by composers—there’s other composers on this list—I’m just putting them on this list because they’re both composers and producers. To me, I like to intentionally cross those wires. The only difference is institutional involvement and finances and class and stuff like that. I don’t know what rap music he was into, but I’m sure it was some. I’m sure he’d regard Preservation as a great composer, too.

I agree. Anybody who’s willing and able to put sounds together in a way that sounds cool is composing. I think the biggest difference is in ambition and vision. I don’t really think one is more valuable than the other, especially when race, class, resources, and accessibility are factored in.  

The other side of elitism when it comes to music and culture is the old money, the academics, and the classical concert pianist image that those types of people could fit into. But then on the other side of elitism, there’s the commercial side. The big labels aren’t very classy, they put out slop, but they’re elite because of the resources they have access to. If you look at everybody, whether that’s in the underground or the so-called elites, everybody’s just trying shit. Anyone who’s pretending to know what the best art is or when the best time to say what is or what the people need or what’s real…everybody’s just making shit up and trying shit. We’re creatives, and to act like access to elite circumstance is more valuable is crazy.

RP Boo: “Speakers R-4 (Sounds)”

I’m a big fan of footwork and other genres from Chicago. I often shout out Traxman because he’s a legend—one of the first people whose music fit into both the categories of IDM and hip-hop at the same time. Traxman is so book-smart headass, but also street smart and for the club down. RP Boo is someone else I heard around the same time, another legend. I remember hearing Legacy, the record this song is on. Any song from that album could go onto this inspo list, but I chose “Speakers R-4” because of the lyrics. It’s kinda breaking the fourth wall, in a way. I like dance tracks that command you. It’s almost like this one is a note to the sound technician: “You better make this shit bang.” To me, it’s almost sassy. 

If you took music programming knowledge and applied it to software programming, there’d be a certain aesthetic quality of genius that would be applied to people like RP Boo. It’d be like, Oh, you can do that? That would take me five months. With creative things, most people think you’re stuck with the holy ghost and you let the ancestors move through you, but nah, your brain works differently than other people’s. You’re next level. 

Ziad Rahbani: “Sa’alouni El Naas”

This song is really dope and beautiful. He composed it when he was a teenager. He also just passed away really recently, and he’s one of the most legendary composers in the world of Arabic music and the son of Fairuz, one of the most famous composers from Lebanon. The reason I was having such a hard time is because the album I picked is just an instrumental album with him as bandleader, but it also made it to Fairuz’s album under the name “Sa’alouni El Naas.” He’s an icon and I wanted to shout him out, especially with the news of his passing. I think his work is important and I want people to know it as a reference point for my work.

I feel like when it comes to me engaging anything that has to do with the region, people don’t really give it any depth and we keep having the same conversations over and over, like: “Where are you from? What are you sampling? War is bad.” It’s hard to get to a deeper conversation instead of having the same 101-level course every single year because the West keeps failing it. 

[Rahbani] was a very politically loud person and a communist, and for most of his adult life—he was born in the ’40s—there was a civil war happening in Lebanon. This song is from 1957, so it’s not specifically from the war era, but that civil war lasted over 20 years. It’s not like they just settled on peace and everything was cool and such a vibe. He’s a very playful character and uses sarcasm a lot in his plays and songs and is an atheist like me, too. There’s a lot about him that makes me feel like I’m a part of a certain strain of Arab dissidents that are against God and railing against really basic things to me, like, ‘These factions are pretending [these wars] are about religious differences.’ It’s not about that, but that’s what they’re pretending it’s about. This is common knowledge to people, but it’s something that’s hard to translate cross-culturally. All the U.S. knows is that there’s never been peace in the Middle East. So Rahbani is really dope for that. Rest in power to him. I hope we can produce music and art this generation that makes him proud of the tools he gave us as younger musicians growing up listening to his stuff.

Free Palestine, too.

Free Palestine, motherfucker.  

Don Caballero:  “World Class Listening Problem”

I think that rock bands in niche scenes just had more of a lock on distribution in the CD era, to be perfectly honest. Getting CDs was my equivalent to pre-internet digging. There’s even a possibility that this might’ve been one of my sister’s first CDs that I took from her room and listened to it. Don Cab also had this thing where they copied the Run-DMC logo, and that was intriguing. I just love math rock—I love things that are dreamy and layered and complicated. It also sounds a lot like Traxman if he was in a math rock band, you know what I mean?

Three 6 Mafia: “Tear Da Club Up ’97”

Producers: DJ Paul & Juicy J

I was gonna pick them regardless because of what the Memphis sound means to me—I really love the production on Tommy Wright’s stuff and have been listening to a ton of Gangsta Boo lately—but I wanted to go with this one specifically. The overlap with club music and the use of vocals is really cool. There’s so much that ends up in Three 6 beats that isn’t musical, but creates this theatrical experience. I could watch a lyric video with the song on a good sound system and feel like I watched a good experimental film or something like that. Today, it might be technique that would almost be on the cringe side, but it was really impactful to hear stuff like that. It’s like how I was saying Mos Def actually had a purpose and a message—they had a purpose with the picture to create this thing.

I feel like I do my own version of that, too. You can hear it in “Stenography” and “Handplay” and [Elucid’s] “Zigzagzig” where I take the vocal, resample it, and put it in the beat. I saw someone had posted “Stenography” on Reddit and they were like, “I like how they started out their verses by doing ad-libs,” and I was like, “Cool, it didn’t even sound like I sampled it. It sounded like Elucid was ad-libbing his way into his verse.” On “Tear Da Club Up,” it’s more like a chant that’s performed live. There’s a conversation happening there that’s really cool. 

Peaches: “Fuck The Pain Away”

I don’t know where I first heard it. When I was looking at it recently to put together this playlist, I was like ‘Wow, this has gotten a lot of placements on TV and stuff.’ I might’ve heard it on Tumblr, it seems like the kind of thing that would’ve popped on Tumblr, like porn literotica. The production is really what does it. Maybe it’s because I’m old now, but the crassness of the lyrics isn’t as striking to me, but the production is so moving. I just love bass, and it’s a very uniquely designed bassline. And the aesthetic of “a pretty minimal beat that’s pretty bassy and a woman’s voice kind of used rhythmically” is something I do. [laughs]. Maybe not off of [Beside Myself], but “Bless Grips” [with Moor Mother as 700 Bliss] is a similar format. I remember thinking “Bless Grips” deserves to be as big as this song—what do I have to do to eat off one song forever? I’ve looked up Peaches and Peaches is still doing weird stuff. She’s very sex-posi and always talks about trans rights, so she has good politics, but then I’m on her Instagram and it’s like “Oh, you made this art installation that’s of an orgy. Cool.”