Meet the Palestinian DJ, Sama

It’s a few hours before Sama Abdulhadi is due to perform at Vibe Series in Dubai and the young Palestinian DJ, music producer and audio engineer is busy organising her playlist.

“I always play new stuff,” she says. “Every week I go onto Beatport, listen to everything techno that has been uploaded, and buy everything I like. Sometimes I just manage to find seven good tracks, and sometimes I end up buying 60. This time I think I have 40 or something.”

Amongst them is Mathame’s ‘Skywalking’, a sublime slice of euphoric techno that not only helps to explain Sama’s appeal, but her meteoric rise. She plays the kind of heads-down techno that entrances crowds, turning regular nights out into the kind of life-affirming experiences clubbers dream of. The end result is a young woman in high demand.

To find out how she got here you have to turn the clock back just over a year to Boiler Room Palestine. Streamed live last June from the courtyard of Radio in Ramallah, Sama’s hour-long Boiler Room set propelled her onto the global stage. It would make her a household clubbing name, help change perceptions of what it means to be young and Palestinian, and launch her on a whirlwind tour of some of the world’s best nightclubs and electronic music festivals. Prior to Boiler Room she had been a relatively unknown techno DJ living in Paris.

“Boiler Room changed everything,” she says. “I’ve been seeing so much and learning so much, it’s crazy.” This autumn alone she is performing everywhere from Madrid to Istanbul, taking with her an unstoppable zest for life and a laptop full of tunes. It’s all far, far removed from her early days in Ramallah.

“I started DJing in Palestine and in the beginning it didn’t work,” she admits. “Nobody liked techno. Then I met a woman from Haifa called Fidaa who had just moved to Palestine and had taken over a bar and bought herself a house in Ramallah. I was just passing the bar one day and a friend was playing electronic music and the sound was really bad, so I ran on stage and fixed the EQ. “Fidaa came over and she’s like, ‘who are you and how did you do that?’ I said I was sorry and didn’t mean to overstep, but it was just too bassy. She suggested we host a party together and even though I said it wasn’t going to work as I’d tried before, she insisted. She said: ‘The money is there, I will pay you before you play, just come and play as a job’. So I did.

“Then she brought a bus of 50 people from Haifa to Ramallah and she was telling them ‘there’s this DJ in Ramallah you guys have to see’. That’s when we met Haifa for the first time. I was like ‘who are these people? Who are you other Palestinians that we’ve never seen before?’ They came with their mohawks and their dreadlocks because they’re in the Western world so they literally travel to Europe every weekend. We don’t. It was the first time we’d met and danced together. The whole city was talking about the party for a week and this new vibe and energy came to the city. It gave birth to something that still exists ’til now.”

Born in Jordan, raised in the West Bank, Sama’s work and studies have taken her from Amman to London and Cairo, where she worked as a sound designer in the film industry for five years. It was in Beirut that she heard techno for the first time – at a Satoshi Tomiie concert – and she moved to Paris in 2017 for a six-month residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts. Although she has her own company – a music publishing house in Egypt – and is producing her own music, it is DJing that has monopolised her life.

“My life is manic,” she says with a laugh. “I’m playing all over the place, which is nice, but it’s very hectic… But one of the things that annoys me about the music scene is that it’s more of a show than it is about music. I can play for hours but they care about seeing me and what I’m wearing and what I’m talking about more than what I’m playing. It’s the same reason why Haifa Wehbe [a Lebanese singer] is famous. Because people don’t care about the music, they just want to look at her. The industry is more about the looks. Like Nina Kraviz for example. She’s literally an Instagram model that occasionally DJs.”

“I’m not influenced by social media. There’s nothing social media can influence me with techno. I’m not going to listen to a DJ because they have a lot of followers, I’m going to listen to them because they have good music.”