Name: Samer Etienne Chami aka Etyen

Nationality: Lebanese
Occupation: Producer, songwriter, label founder at Thawra
Current Release: The untitled debut album by Etyen is out via Thawra.
Recommendations: One of my favorite music albums of all time: Takk by Sigur Ros. And my favorite movie of all time: Mulholland Drive by David Lynch. 

If you enjoyed this interview with Etyen and would like to know more, visit him on Instagram, Facebook, twitter, and Soundcloud.



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

I grew up with music at home, my father was a drummer and musician during the 70s, and we listened to music all the time as children. Both my sister and I were in the national conservatory from an early age learning the piano and later I started writing songs and taught myself the guitar at around 12 years old and spent the next ten years completely mesmerized by writing, playing and performing music with a band.

I listened to a lot of Sigur Ros, Animal Collective, Radiohead etc, fascinated by the sonic universes created by these bands especially how futuristic and yet organic and timeless they sounded.

As I got more into electronic music and production this influence seeped into my music and writing process, and finally I launched my solo moniker Etyen in 2013 with this new creative vision.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?

There are pieces of music that make me feel things that I cannot explain. When I was younger and much more a consumer of music rather than a creator, music was the only realm that felt like home to me. I could get lost for hours listening to an entire album like Takk by Sigur Ros, imagine whole worlds, see the past and the future, find catharsis and heal my inner traumas by just listening to certain songs.



“The nature of daylight” by Max Richter for example is a song that I can always count on when having a anxiety or panic attack.



It inexplicably cures my mind almost like the atoms of my body now vibrate in harmony with the music, so it’s definitely a sort of physical, emotional and thought therapy for me.

[Read our Max Richter interview]
[Read our feature on Max Richter's New Four Seasons]

And this is very much the same creating music, it’s a release of inner feelings and emotions which guides the process rather than me imposing a creative direction or trying to create a specific feeling in a piece of music. This is something I always try to do as I make music; making music without intent beyond the core inspiration.

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

Over the last 10-ish years, I've explored a ton of different approaches to creating and producing.

When I started releasing as Etyen , it was because I thought I had found “my sound”, a sound that has evolved and grew over the years naturally by the many experiences I was a part of, like Red Bull Music academy and Onebeat music residencies and tons of other collaborations that kept reshaping my musical outlook. At each step there was a sort of breakthrough in the sense that I had sensed an arrival to a new point in my life musically and personally which heavily influenced the creative direction of the next period.

This is an ongoing process, and I will always keep evolving and trying new things to feed that drive I’ve always had, and to express myself in the truest and most genuine form.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

I come from a multicultural background, being from Lebanon but growing up with a strong Western influence in music and lifestyle, with family members from different nationalities, religions and cultures, but also very much exposed to the local culture as well.

Living in Beirut for the last 30 years, you also are constantly surrounded by chaos. Apart from all the conflict, wars, bombings that I grew up around and also the recent collapse of the nation, day to day life here has always been extremely chaotic and this is something that has very much influenced who I am personally and musically, and in both good and negative ways.

Musically I think it’s clear, and I've always been told that there's so much going on in my songs especially in the early years of my career. I was always also fascinated by music that has so many little details and nuances that you can barely grasp what the ‘whole’ is. However, I like to believe that it is a sort of controlled chaos, so while there is a lot going on in the arrangements and production, it’s all somehow still working together in near harmony, just like Lebanon did for almost 30 years before collapsing.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

Being genuine and allowing myself to explore new ideas.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

I believe that being original and genuine usually produces timeless music. I’m not interested in any particular “sound” or creation or continuation of a “sound”.

As an Arab but also globalized person, I inherently draw inspiration from the ideas and music that have shaped who I am over the years, and in some cases where I had a new found love or appreciation for some element of traditional music, then I've explored that, but really all I really care about is blurting out what is inside of my head and heart in the only way I know and feel comfortable doing, which is through music.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

I grew up singing and playing a bunch of instruments and these have been essential tools for me as I delved deeper into electronic music and sound design.

After a lot of exploration in electronics, I realized that the most meaningful works for me personally have been those that incorporate at least one of these elements that initially shaped who I am as a musician.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

When I have studio work (which is a lot of the time) my morning starts with feeding and playing with my 2 cats Tomtom and Lucy, followed by a visit to the colony of street cats that have adopted me as their caretaker. After that it’s coffee and straight to work in my home studio (at the moment), with intermittent breaks for kitty playing and cuddling time.

I tend to keep working  until I finish a big bulk of my objectives of the day before I realize I’m really hungry and stop to to make lunch. After that it’s back to work till evening.

It doesn’t sounds healthy,  but I’ve arrived at a point where I force myself to  stop working at a certain hour of the day and leave my evenings free for plans with friends or family to have a better work-life balance.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

My new album which came out Nov 22, I wrote over a period of 6-7 years starting in 2014/15. The approach, sonically, was to reincorporate the natural talents I gew up with (singing, playing guitar and instruments) within this new found fascination for electronic music and sound design and tonal and textural manipulation etc. I tried to marry the two personas in me, the musician singer-songwriter from my youth and this new electronic producer obsessed with texture and bass and synthesizers.

I’ve always loved to create simple but meaningful melodies, and with this album each song started from exactly that: a specific guitar or piano hook that I came up with on the instrument without thinking of production or electronics or anything like that. It was about going back to my roots and writing music in an analog way, on my guitar and only ony the guitar for example. This is how music was made when I was growing up, without access to music technology and VSTs and all that, and my first songs at 12-13 years old were simply guitar and vocals and I had to imagine everything else in my head.

So with this album, it’s really an ode to a life lived musically and personally, with the themes being as simple and universal as the basic emotions that almost every human being in the world goes through as they grow old, regardless of the circumstances which stems them.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

I’ve experienced both and received a lot from both making music alone and collaborating.

What I love about collaborating is that it forces us to stop being so self-centered as artists and listen to others and consider their outlook, something that is extremely important to growing as an artist. With the right mindset, collaboration can yield insane and unexpected results that could heavily influence an artist and forever change how they approach music making.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

To engage without necessarily aiming to do so. Of course music can be political or provocative. But essentially I believe music is for many, a way to document our world for each of us, and find who we are. It’s an everlasting companion that journeys with us from the moment we’re born till we die.

It’s at the core a key human sense to explore. Just like using sight to discover new places, seeing the mountain or the sea or whatever for the first time, our ears are a fundamental organ that gives a different perspective and experience of our world.

I believe myself to be a worldly person, I’ve experienced people and cultures all over the world and have a quite universal outlook on life. I fully understand that I am not alone and that I am not special and that we are all more or less the same apart from the experiences we accumulate (which is one of the themes of my latest album). Thematically, I rarely tend to explore ideas that are limited to a certain geographical area or specific people or something like that.

At the end of the day, a lot of the personal human themes that one may explore are universal and common to almost all.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

Almost all the time. Growing up, all the music I listened to helped me deal with my “inner demons”, (again Sigur Ros for example) find who I am and understand more about what the world is.

On my latest album “Untitled”, I exactly explore those very human and common themes “love, loss grief” within the philisophical understanding of what it means to be human and what is basically the meaning of life.   

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?

I graduated with an engineering degree from university, so I had a very scientific educational upbringing and have always been fascinated by the sciences, especially math, physics and chemistry courses that help describe and observe the universe. At the same time I’ve been obsessed with music since a very young age and always knew there to be a relationship between the two, especially in music theory, and that was only made even more obvious to me when I started learning about sound and sound theory.

Music and sound are a science, the only difference is music or sound have this extra layer that you can rarely explain and even if we studied the exact movement of the air that generates a certain piece or sound that moves you at the core, there would still be that inexplicable factor as to why what is happening inside is in fact happening.

There are pieces of music that I go to to quell anxiety or even diminish panic attacks. As an adolescent, certain music like Sigur Ros healed childhood traumas and helped me cope with the world around me. And while we could break everything down and calculate how these frequencies and this energy vibrates the air and in which exact way, I’ll never be able to truly describe what is happening inside.

In a way it's like being in love, a scientist could potentially open up your brain, track markers and know more or less what is happening on a biological or even atomic level but they could still never explain why what is happening is happening. That is the beauty of this particular science in my opinion.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Fundamentally, you can argue that there is a guide to making a cup of coffee just like there is one for making music, and there is the ability to bend the rules in both of these processes. With writing or performing music however, the nuances for me are just on another level.

A piece of music can release feelings buried within feelings ,within a memory of someone, that reminds us of a place, that feels like home, and can help us heal or catharsis for example. That isn’t something I’d personally get from making a cup of coffee.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

The ability to listen is one of our core ways to experience the world around us. So it’s no wonder for me that this stimulus would know no bounds, and isn't limited to simply what our brains can interpret.

We have extremely complex brains that are ripe with potential for more, compared to other creatures, so how deep and diverse is just relative to how much we allow ourselves to process this stimulus in my opinion.