For Habibi Funk Records, the music never dies

Jannis Stürtz and his team are passionate about making little-known and exceptional music accessible. Bringing music back to life is his speciality — all the more so if it has been forgotten or its prominence has been limited to its country of origin. Stürtz is the founder of Habibi Funk Records — the Berlin-based record label spotlighting the “Arabic Funk, Jazz and other organic sounds we like from the 1970s and 1980s”. Running a record label in Europe which releases music from North Africa and the Middle East inherently presents a wide-ranging array of challenges which Stürtz must contend with. In an anecdotally-rich discussion, he divulges how his label not only reissues music but also its accompanying context. Beyond this, he explains how he is actively attempting to avoid cultural appropriation, through an ethos of transparency, authenticity and consistently engaging in a nuanced cultural dialogue.

How does the Habibi Funk team operate?

We work on a project-by-project basis, usually bringing different people on board to contribute to individual projects. This allows us to integrate local people from the places where the music is coming from into our process. For example, Ahmed works on reissues from Libya, which is helpful for a variety of reasons including the fact that I can’t go there. I’m thinking about going there this year, as the security situation seems to be improving. I’ve been really into their music lately. 

We work with a woman from Morocco, as well as two people in Sudan: Larissa who’s German but she has been living there for a few years and Yassin who is Sudanese and works in the IT of the UN. Way before I started Habibi Funk, he had begun a YouTube channel dedicated to Sudanese jazz music so he already knew a lot of people and has contributed to a number of projects. 

Basically, the organisation is Berlin-based, with me in an office every day, even pre-corona, with a lot of people joining for individual projects.

Is it quite challenging to share non-European music when you are a Berlin-based label? From your point of view, what are the challenges related to this, particularly given the ethical considerations that need to be made when resharing Arabic music?

I’m not connected with the music scene in Berlin, I don’t go out and I don’t socialise out here. However, if you are a music label that deals with recordings from countries where you didn’t grow up, you take on a certain responsibility to be aware of that contextual situation. 

I think in our particular case, it requires us to be aware of colonial history and the fact that the relationship between North Africa, the Middle East and Europe is historically problematic. The question we have to ask ourselves is “how does that reflect in our work?” 

There are a couple of things that are relatively easy to identify: making sure that the visual representations of these projects don’t succumb to Euro-centric stereotypes that have existed regarding North Africa and the Middle East. For example, as a general rule, we try to not have camels and pyramids on the covers. At the same time, we know that historically, economic exchanges are often conducted in an exploiting nature and it is very important that the type of licences we have are set up in a way that I would feel comfortable posting publicly. 

There’s nothing in there that anyone could challenge and I could not stand behind. We split all of the profits 50/50. We also don’t own the music—our financial model licences them for a couple of years before the rights return to the artist or their families.

More than simply releasing a reedition, you also pay tribute to musicians’ lives as artists. The work you’ve done on Ahmed Malek is a good example — you retrace the history of a record in order to understand its secrets. How do you go about releasing the music with its appropriate surrounding context?

Our physical release comes with a booklet which interviews the artist and including photographs. A journalist and friend of mine from Sudan, wrote an article contextualising the political frame of the music because a lot of the songs are political.

We are always trying to contextualise the music as much as possible. Not just making it available, but also giving the context in which the music was created — obviously, we’re not the only label doing it but it’s still part of the job. 

It’s also important to remain open to people’s criticisms about what we do because we are a European label dealing with non-European music. Often, these are people who have legitimate concerns and issues and it’s important to be open to that. From the get-go, we knew that we cannot block off criticism because it might come from a place where people are trying to contribute to a dialogue with the knock-on effect of improving certain practices.

How do you arrange your collaborations? Is it a case of always wanting to work with artists from the Arab world?

Well, as an example, we had our merch shot in Cairo and naturally, we ended up hiring an Egyptian photographer. We tend to work with people from the countries and cities that the music originates from. 

I always come to the music and popular culture of North Africa and the Middle East as a guest. As a result, both my knowledge and perceptions are far more limited than someone who grew up in Lebanon or Egypt for example. 

I would not work with German designers and photographers in this scenario because they’re more prone to having blind spots particularly surrounding certain issues such as visual representation. At the same time, we are also not super strict about it, it’s also just people that I meet because I like their work, and then something arises out of that interaction. 

Usually, choosing the people that we work with is a fairly organic process. I have rarely approached people saying “do you want to work on this?”. It is usually about having some sort of connection. 

It is the same for both of the labels I’ve founded. I’ve never had a bill-paying job that hasn’t involved running a music label. Jakarta has existed for much longer than Habibi Funk, and we have never made an upcoming year-plan or a five-year plan. A lot of the stuff we do is done simply because we feel like doing it. 

Everything has to make sense, but it’s an overall picture. If we want to do a release, we are still going to do it irrespective of profitability, because luckily there are other releases that have made enough profit to sustain everything.

This makes me wonder how was Habibi Funk born?

Pure coincidence! There is a rapper from Ghana who used to be on Jakarta Records. He got booked to play this huge festival in Morocco called Mawazine, and I went alone as a tour manager and stayed a couple of days longer. I randomly walked through Casablanca, found a place that was repairing old electronics, and behind the electronics you could see tons of records.

It turned out that the store owner used to have a record distribution company in the 1970s and 1980s. I found this record by Fadoul. I was super excited and started trying to find out anything I could about Fadoul, but no matter how you Googled it, in Arabic of in Latin letters, you couldn’t find anything. 

Half a year later, I went again to Morocco and found another record by Fadoul. Then we decided to spend two years trying to find Fadoul. After a year, we met some musicians who were in the same scene as him but they told us that he’d passed away in the early 1990s. 

Then we found his family. We found someone a friend of his who remembered where his family used to live five years ago. We went to this neighbourhood in Casablanca, and walked around showing the sleeves of the record to people sitting at cafes, asking “Do you know this man?”. Eventually, we found someone who knew his brother. 

It was funny because the daughter of the brother opened the door and she had never met Fadoul. She knew that she had an uncle that she’d never met, but nobody told her that he was a musician. 

She looked at the record sleeves and was like “this guy looks like my dad but it is not my dad!” — that was the starting point of the label. We realised that more and more people were interested in the music we were releasing. 

At that point, there already were a lot of labels dedicated to Nigerian and Ethiopian music. There were a few releases from North Africa and the Middle East, to my knowledge, there were no labels focused on this type of music.

What are the projects you have lined up for 2021? Are you mainly going to focus on one artist?

We licensed an entire album of Hamid El Shaeri’s material, the author of Ayonha. Then there we have two to three releases from Libya lined up. In Lybia you have a lot of Reggae Music, it has been super popular there since the 1970s. Artists have told me this is because the traditional rhythmic patterns of Lybian music, is very close to the off-beat rhythm of reggae. So it was easy for reggae to become popular in Lybia because it was something which sounded familiar. 

Not that many musicians have made their names known outside of Lybia. You have Ahmed Fakroun, Hamid El Shaeri but I guess he is more considered to be an Egyptian artist, even though he is Lybian. 

Most of them were successful within Lybia. But these projects take longer because I can’t go their myself, and our local colleague there has a full-time job beside this and is very busy, so he can’t always be available either. We will be putting out an album by Roger Fakhr who is a Lebanese musician, he was the guitar player of Fairuz. He made folk music with English lyrics in the 1970s, and it was never released. In 1985, he went on a US tour with Fairuz, and stayed in California and never returned. Half of his recordings were never released, the other half were just traded by hand in Lebanon.

Look out for future releases on Habibi Funk Records and explore their existing work here.