Hawa Sarita is the DJ alias of ever talented and evolving Sarah Gamrani, a poetess and the cavernous vocals behind duo, Baraka.
First and foremost, can you tell us a little bit about the energy behind this mix, is there anything you would prescribe doing while listening?
This mix brings together the club music aesthetics I like to listen to and play at the moment, it's a fusion of new releases and trance pépites from the 90s and 2000s. I really like the different shades of progressive trance mixed with incisive broken beats, emotional-melodic breaks and bass lines that keep the groove going. I recorded it in my studio for a whole afternoon and I danced a lot while doing it! I recommend listening to it to energize yourself while walking in the city or very loud at home to dance on your bed.
Baraka is the fantastic acid baby of you and DJ/Producer, Cristofeu, encompassing a whole myriad of 90s club culture nostalgia and electronic/acid elements, topped off with your magnificent and cavernous vocals. How did Baraka come to be and how does its sound differ from Hawa Sarita solo?
Baraka is a duo, in which I sing, that was born in Vienna where we spent the first lockdown with Cristofeu in 2020. We started to put together productions of his and lyrics/songs of mine written a few years earlier and we quickly had a common vision of wanting to create a complete artistic project. For both of us, visual and musical identity go hand in hand and we develop both with equal importance. I perform as a singer on stage with Baraka and it’s 100% our musical content. We also have a hybrid DJ set performance in which we gather and go further into the musical sonorities that inspire us as a duo (trance/trip-hop/acid/breaks), while adding our touch using my organic voice sounds as a complementary tool to the music that is being played.
Hawa Sarita is my solo project as a DJ and which I consider as a free playground for experimentation. There are, of course, some similarities as I have common references and a strong taste for trance, breaks and acid sonorities that define my musical identity too. But it is also a space where I perform poetry, write, facilitate poetry workshops and advocate for more inclusive and diverse festive spaces with my collective Au-delà du Club.
Have you always been a singer/songwriter? And who/what were some musical influences for you growing up that have led to where you are now?
Since I was very young, I have been writing bits of life in diaries, poems and songs in notebooks, both in English and French. I started to sing when I was 7 and learned to play the guitar around 12 to be able to write and sing my own songs. I have a lot of different influences, both from pop-folk music like Bon Iver for example, which has been a very important sound universe for me. But also icons like Björk, Madonna, Beyoncé or Massive Attack. I love entering unique musical universes when I listen to music so all these artists who endlessly have created or (re)invented their own musical styles are a great source of inspiration to me.
Regarding my inspiration as a DJ at the moment, I like to explore the trance sounds of the 90's as well as the evolution of this style nowadays such as 2.0 progressive trance gems as I like to call them, coming straight from Naarm/Melbourne or Dublin for example. But as I have a very diverse musical culture coming from different soundscapes, I don't like to restrict myself to one style and I see music as being in constant motion. I play what thrills me at the moment and it can be different from one period to another.
“I used poetry as a research method in poetry workshops, as a feminist heritage but also as an artistic way to write about night spaces. Eight artists participated in the research and wrote such powerful poems that I decided to publish them in a book, accompanied by analogue photographs.”
Can you tell us a little bit about how Au-delà du Club came to be and where you hope to see it going?
Au-delà du Club emerged from the research I did on creating new narratives about the electronic scenes based on the words and experiences of gendered DJ artists. I used poetry as a research method in poetry workshops, as a feminist heritage but also as an artistic way to write about night spaces. Eight artists participated in the research and wrote such powerful poems that I decided to publish them in a book, accompanied by analogue photographs. An artist initially involved in the project, Hewan Aman, gave a new impulse to the project by creating the entire art direction for this first book. Through her, I met other people and artists who are now part of our collective, such as Bambi (Célia Texier) and Astan (Laure Togola). Together we continue to create research projects, exhibitions and events exploring the question: how can we create safer, more inclusive and diverse festive spaces? We imagine our collective as a laboratory because we deeply need the space to experiment, to question, to make mistakes and to learn.
Our next big research project for 2023 is called Flashes, which consists of thematic fanzine publications on key issues in the French and European electronic scenes. We are meeting clubs, festive spaces, professionals and collectives to question them about inclusive lineups, architecture and club spaces, prevention on sexist and sexual harrassment, training for security teams and many more issues. The important thing for us is to show the inspiring solutions that have already been implemented and to spread them to as many people as possible to positively change our nights. We are also working on an exhibition for spring and on our event and music lab called tentacular - which will have a musical curation very much influenced by the work done by Bambi and Hewan Aman in the radio show of the same name but which will also explore other types of hybrid performances in festive spaces.
What is next for Hawa Sarita?
I’m currently working on a hybrid performance for the Sturmfrei Festival in Paris (December 2nd at Le Sample) - it’s a short dj set in which I read electronic poems accompanied by a VJ live performance by the artist Clémé.
Otherwise, lots of projects and work to do with Baraka as we are creating an exhibition in Paris for the vinyl release of our first EP, launching a screen-printed tee collection, working on new video clips and already preparing our next releases for 2023.
Stay up to date with Hawa Sarita here!