Mai Mai Mai’s ‘Karakoz’ Frames Palestinian Voices Under Genocide

Mai Mai Mai, the experimental project of Italian artist Toni Cutrone, occupies a unique corner of the global underground electronic circuit. His work filters Mediterranean and Southern Italian folkloric traditions through abrasive industrial textures and ambience, creating dense, ritualistic soundscapes that feel both archival and futuristic.

His latest release, Karakoz - following his acclaimed Southern Gothic double album Rimorso - came as a result of a six-week residency with Radio Alhara’s Wonder Cabinet between January and May 2024, across Bethlehem and Ramallah. The project marks Cutrone’s first engagement with Middle Eastern music, but rather than imposing his aesthetic onto the region, he worked to trace the contours of Palestinian sonic heritage, weaving spiritual hymns, field recordings and traditional instrumentation into his brooding industrial framework.

Released via Maple Death Records, the seven-track album draws extensively from archival material sourced from the Palestinian Sound Archive at the Popular Art Center in Ramallah, as well as ambient recordings that Mai Mai Mai accumulated during his stay in the country. These recordings are interlaced with studio collaborations and live sessions with local musicians, forming a textured meditation on memory, identity, land and resistance, one that is less a reinterpretation than a careful assemblage, foregrounding tension, fragility and endurance within a landscape fractured by ongoing Israeli violence.

“At the time I was growing up, there was a strong pro-Palestine movement from the left-wing in Italy," Cutrone tells SceneNoise. "So Palestine has always been in our subconscious. But with this project, for the first time, I understood what it means to make music for resistance and really felt the real meaning of making music for a deep cause.”

The title Karakoz references the shadow theatre tradition of the Ottoman Empire, embedded within Palestinian cultural history. For Cutrone, the metaphor was fitting. “I wanted to create an immersive, spiritual journey. Karakoz carries a brooding ambiguity, as if the shadows of the land were telling their own story.”

The album opens with ‘Grief’, which sees Maya Al Khaldi deliver a traditional lament that Cutrone frames with slow-building waves of distortion and restraint. On ‘Dawn of the Cremisan Valley’, experimental electronic producer Julmud injects syncopated rhythms and abrasive textures, while ‘Echoes of the Harvest’ unfolds as a sparse Buchla-and-saxophone elegy composed by British musician and activist Alabaster DePlume, threaded with a sampled vocal from Hajja Badriya sourced from the Ramallah archive. The record also features yarghul by Osama Abu Ali and studio recordings in Ramallah with Jihad Shouibi and Karam Fares on percussion and bouzouq.

Released via Maple Death Records, the seven-track album draws extensively from archival material sourced from the Palestinian Sound Archive at the Popular Art Center in Ramallah, as well as ambient recordings that Mai Mai Mai accumulated during his stay in the country. These recordings are interlaced with studio collaborations and live sessions with local musicians, forming a textured meditation on memory, identity, land and resistance, one that is less a reinterpretation than a careful assemblage, foregrounding tension, fragility and endurance within a landscape fractured by ongoing Israeli violence.

In Karakoz, Mai Mai Mai positions himself less as an auteur and more as a conduit attempting to immortalise voices and the history of a land that is currently being erased by the Israeli Occupation as we speak. In doing so, the record leaves a lasting imprint, one that is shaped by listening as much as by making.