The Berlin-based artist Alif Hilal moves between experimental music, electronic production, and performance. Across her work, the human voice serves as both instrument and medium, exploring themes of spirituality, community, and connection.
With Hymnal (Resung), Alif Hilal returns to the world of Hymnal through a series of reinterpretations shaped by collaboration and exchange. Rather than treating the project as a conventional remix record, she sees it as an extension of an ongoing musical dialogue. We spoke with Hilal about creative exchange, the spiritual potential of the voice, and the search for meaning in a time marked by uncertainty.
RUBY STEIN Hi Alif, what kind of spaces make you feel most inspired?
ALIF HILAL All kinds of spaces inspire me! Sacred spaces, temples, covered forests, canyons, gorges and valleys. Wide mountain ranges, pebbled beaches, volcanic coastlines, islands, shrub and brush. Well-curated and cared-for domestic spaces, brutalist industrial spaces turned into sites of deeper meaning, abandoned hotels and theaters. Lynchian dive bars and strange curated speakeasies, laboratories, farms and ranches, caves…
RS You started doing music when you were around 15 or 16 years old, right?
AH Yes! I remember thinking, I can’t go wrong with this.
RS What has changed since then?
AH So much has changed. As we grow and become better people, we become better musicians. We are music, and music is a reflection of our lives. My relationship with music continues to grow and evolve as I grow and evolve. It’s an endless, beautiful journey of discovery.
RS Beautifully said! Now, thinking about Hymnal, the first album was already such a complete and immersive body of work. What made you want to revisit it through Hymnal (Resung) rather than move directly into something entirely new?
AH Well, Hymnal was deeply inspired by peak-time rave and trance states. By Sufi Islamic ritual practice, and the propulsion of the human body through lattices of rhythm and melody. Because rave was such an important seed for this album, it felt important to connect it back to the collective voice and dance culture. Also, selfishly, I needed there to be some versions of the tracks that could be played in clubs, as a final devotional act of transmission for the feeling and intention of this music.
RS You’ve described these tracks not as remixes but as “polyphonic transmissions.” What distinguishes Resung from a traditional remix project in your mind?
AH I tend to resist language that’s been given to me by the industry. The language of music engineering, for example, “mix”, is very clinical and objective. There’s no poetry in it. I want the project to speak to the collectivity of musical dialogue: building a creative language together and sharing musical forms and experiences. It reflects the ways our work and voices combine into energies far more complex than individual selves, while respecting the sacred quality of the work and the handmade craftsmanship that electronic music often deserves but does not often receive.
RS The collaborators on this project come from very different musical and cultural backgrounds. What connected them all to the spirit of Hymnal?
AH Each artist engages with ancestral and folkloric forms of song, rhythm, melody, and storytelling through their own practices, lineages, and languages: from Dumama’s futurist Xhosa folk music to Laurel Halo’s Detroit roots. I use the term folk music broadly, viewing musical subgenres as lineages within a contemporary folkloric landscape. As a curator, I aim to emphasize diversity, cultural specificity, storytelling, and plurality. While the multiplicity of human culture must be respected and preserved, my music and voice served as a bridge for the artists’ acts of extension and translation.
RS Collaborators like Djrum approached the material very differently. Were there any reinterpretations that surprised you emotionally?
AH Djrum’s was surprising for me, actually. I didn’t expect it to be so hefty and intense. It takes Ending such a deep and cosmic endpoint. All of them are surprising to me in some way. I get giddy listening back to them and hearing the transformations.
RS Hymnal is described as both futuristic and human. In an era increasingly shaped by AI and digital acceleration, what do you think people are searching for emotionally in music right now?
AH Togetherness. Communion. The processing of grief and confusion. The calming of anxiety. Purpose. Meaning. Humanness. Validation of our meaning as beings. Belonging. Faith in something. Something beyond this system and this time.
RS To talk about the opposite of technology. Can the voice be something spiritual?
AH I think the voice was always something spiritual; we just have cultural amnesia about this. Industrial and capitalistic culture has taken over our minds to the point that we have mostly forgotten it. But the resurgence is coming. We desperately need to reconnect with our spiritual voices and our spiritual bodies.
RS Lastly, when you look ahead, what excites you most right now?
LP I am excited by the radical possibility of reinventing what it means to have a human identity in this cultural mode and time. What excites me equally is the possibility of expanding what it means to be human in this century, expanding the poetry and potentiality of the human soul, and growing with time and change as they unfold within and around us.