John Kameel Farah has something to say. In a recent video posted to his social media accounts, he can be seen playing a harpsichord ahead of a concert in Amsterdam. “Many Europeans would probably deny the connection, but to me it seems obvious that the harpsichord/cembalo is a musical descendant of the kanoun, an instrument used in Arabic/West Asian music,” he wrote in the caption of the post. “In addition to playing masterworks by Bach, Byrd and others, I love to stylistically invoke the kanoun through the harpsichord, firstly because I love the sound, and also because it illustrates a historical point of connection.”

As a classically trained pianist and composer who was born in Brampton, Canada to Palestinian parents, it is that point of connection that John strives to convey in his music. While he embraces Baroque and early music (he says Bach is the one of the main reasons he got into music as a child), he also borrows freely from other genres, including the vast spectrum of Middle Eastern music that he grew up listening to at home, electronic music and experimental jazz. His performances are physical feats as he jumps between piano and synthesizer in endless interpolations and improvisations on classical and Middle Eastern melodies, weaving them together to create contrapunctual compositions that he describes as “Baroque-Middle Eastern-cyberpunk.” 

John’s collaborations are as diverse as his inspirations. He has worked with choreographers and astrophysicists, and is a member of the Canadian Electronic Music Ensemble, the oldest continuously active live-electronic performing group in the world. He has been invited to perform in concert halls across Europe, gracing the stage of prestigious concert halls throughout the continent, in addition to touring across North America, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Jordan and Palestine. In 2023, he joined the pioneering German electronic band Tangerine Dream during their show in Toronto, and is now doing a composition residency at the National Arts Centre, writing a new work for piano and orchestra that he will also perform. But he told me that one of his greatest personal achievements has been to perform Bach’s complete Well-Tempered Clavier from memory.  

In addition to his music, John creates exquisite ink line drawings that, while departing from his musical work, complement the intricacy and improvisation of his compositions. His visual art has been presented in solo and group exhibitions, and he sometimes incorporates projections of his drawings into his performances, including a series focusing on olive trees, trying to draw attention to the destruction of olive groves in Palestine. 

My first introduction to John’s music was through the podcast Sandy and Nora Talk Politics, where his distinct sounds accompany the show’s intro and outro. When I learned that we were both living in Berlin – he has been here since 2011 – I knew I had to reach out to him. This past November, we met at a cafe in the historically immigrant and working class neighbourhood of Neukölln. The area – and in particular Sonnenallee, a street which cuts through the district – is the heart of the largest Palestinian community in Europe. The street is lined with Arab supermarkets, cafes, hookah bars and restaurants, many proudly displaying flags and keffiyahs in their windows. Despite the strong Palestinian presence, Germany is also one of the most ardent supporters of Israel – ideologically, financially and militarily – and pro-Palestinian voices have been repeatedly silenced in the country over the past year and a half. This has been particularly pronounced in the arts, where institutions have had funding removed for hosting pro-Palestinian events and awards have been rescinded from artists whose work is critical of Israel.  

Despite his own difficulties finding work in this political climate, John has increasingly used the platform offered by his performances to talk about Israel’s ongoing genocidal onslaught on Gaza and to push audiences to critically reflect on their assumptions about Palestine and the Middle East. I began by asking John about his music and art, but the conversation inevitably turned to Palestine. 

 

 

For me, Middle Eastern voice in my music doesn’t mean just throw in some dumbek or oud sounds. I want it to be more comprehensive, getting at something deeper. We have a huge problem, stemming from the West’s lack of understanding the Middle East. People’s ignorance enables their governments to keep destroying and colonizing. People don’t understand the layers of what’s gone on in this place. If it’s the main focus of my own life and I’m still discovering it every day, then the average person has no idea.

 

 

I want to begin by asking you about this unique genre that you have carved out for yourself, that you call “Baroque-Middle Eastern-Cyberpunk.” How did this emerge? Did the fusion of these styles come naturally to you, or was this something that developed over time?

On the one hand, it developed over a long time. Through my 20s and 30s, I was active as several different types of musician at the same time. One part of me was playing Baroque and Early Music, another part of me was making electronic tracks, another part of me was doing free jazz/experimental improvisation. I started trying to mix them together haphazardly but slowly over the years it became more and more cohesive. But the other part of answering that question is that, a few years ago, I went to Bach’s grave in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. That was his main church where he was the organist. I suddenly found myself turning 50, and I thought I was just going on a tourist trip – but then I was in tears, because I realized there’s actually been this continuity since I was a kid. The whole reason I got into music was for two reasons: one was Bach and the other one was Wendy Carlos. I would almost say it was Bach through Wendy Carlos. 

Who is Wendy Carlos?

She did the iconic soundtrack for Clockwork Orange, and a seminal album called Switched on Bach. Wendy Carlos made the first attempt at making Baroque music with electronics, and it’s so gorgeous, powerful, moving and playful – no one's ever come close to it since. I heard it as a kid and it changed my world. Every sound is so beautiful, and it made me want to get into music. Now I'm 51 and that’s exactly what I’m doing. I'm actually doing the thing that I fell in love with when I was 8. 

At the age of 8, what was it about this music that made you react so strongly to it?

You have the natural genius of Bach on his own, the galactic architecture and emotional intensity which is already enough for a whole lifetime. Then you had it filtered through this unbelievably curious mind of endlessly varying electronic sounds. It was like a colour explosion of sound. But not just that, it was also the counterpoint and the interaction of music. I would just listen and re-listen and re-listen and re-listen. And I had no idea because I couldn't really play piano and I wasn’t a child prodigy or anything, I just had the cassette.

You’ve spoken really beautifully in the past about how all creative people have a drive or an urge — you describe it as an internal pressure that needs to be let out. How would you describe your urge as a creative person? 

I could never really articulate what exactly it is. How can I say it other than saying it’s an urge? I don’t know the psychology of it. I don’t know how the brain works. It’s kind of a yearning, like a constant thirst or hunger for something to be satisfied, to be coming through your voice. My relationship with drawing is much less clouded than my relationship with making music, because when I’m drawing it is the pure pleasure of doing it regardless of whether the drawing itself ends up being “good” or not. I enjoy the one-to-one relationship with the canvas or with the paper. In a way, it’s a relief from my professional life as a musician, because as a professional musician you've got this thing in your head about what the audience may or may not be thinking. There’s just so much pressure. Imagined pressure – real or not. Thankfully I don't have that with visual art so I feel more playful, and it reminds me to keep that state of mind playing music.

Was drawing always something that you did in addition to the music? Do you feel like they're connected in some way? 

Maybe not directly related but they sort of keep each other alive. I don’t create drawings for pieces of music — they’re not interacting in that way – but they’re coming from the same place. I think that a creative person needs to be playful. Sometimes you have a grander point you want to make, so there can be an element about my music that is about larger scale things, like trying to address problems, historical problems, questions of identity. Like in one piece I use an old Arabic classical form called “Sama’i,” a majestic rhythm in 10/8, and set it to a harmonic progression used in Renaissance keyboard music, mixed with breakbeats and kind of crazy synth sound sculpture. I love it on its own, but I also want to make a connection in the listener’s ear, showing a kind of connection between early European music and Middle Eastern music, not just randomly thrown together but springing from the same tree, mixed also with a kind of futurist aesthetic. That’s biting off a lot but it just feels like my life’s theme. On the other hand, I just love playing around with sound for its own sake. There’s a part of me that loves the beauty and textures of sounds on their own, and of interacting voices, and I love counterpoint, not just in the notes and melodies, but a kind of cultural counterpoint of different time periods. 

By combining Middle Eastern and Baroque styles, was there a conscious effort on your part to intervene in what one might describe as a predominantly white, Western European world of classical music? Has this always been part of your goal, to disrupt this idea and push the boundaries of what the world of classical music can contain, what it can speak to, what it can address?

What I’m trying to do is slowly create an overall body of work that’s addressing all of this stuff bit-by-bit. There are two sides to it. One part is that I just enjoy doing it because I love it, because I love the sounds. I love playing around with electronics. I love the contours of Middle Eastern music – the tunings, rhythms and forms. But for me, Middle Eastern voice in my music doesn’t mean just throw in some dumbek or oud sounds. I want it to be more comprehensive, getting at something deeper. We have a huge problem, stemming from the West’s lack of understanding the Middle East. People’s ignorance enables their governments to keep destroying and colonizing. People don’t understand the layers of what’s gone on in this place. If it’s the main focus of my own life and I’m still discovering it every day, then the average person has no idea. Palestine was the catalyst for all of that, because the history is so incredibly misunderstood. We have to keep going further back to be able to understand how things came to be. So I wish for my concerts to be a bit of a Trojan horse, to try to get people thinking about these things, questioning the official narrative more deeply. It’s my way of contributing to the conversation. 

I know that you have been more directly addressing the situation in Palestine in your performances over the past year, since Israel’s invasion of Gaza began in October 2023 and the genocidal violence that has followed. For example, you have been starting many of your recent performances with a composition called “Lullaby for the Children of Gaza.” Can you tell me a bit about what you have been trying to convey to audiences?

When I’m in front of an audience, that’s a chance to address something. There’s a burning part in me that feels like an important part of the conversation is being left out, and that is understanding the deep historical issues involved with Palestine. I feel that a lot of activists are so focused on what’s happened in the last decades — which we should be, because it's urgent — but I feel that what we’re doing is struggling against the ripples of the waves rather than addressing the deep ocean currents way underneath. Those deep currents are what’s powering the whole thing. I think what’s driving Zionism, beyond religion or aside from religion, is a belief about race. And not only that, but it’s a belief about who the Palestinians are. Because if you define who they are in a way that’s convenient to you, you can dismiss them, demonize them, you can do whatever you want with them, you can push them aside, you can snip the connection to their land. Cleanse and annihilate. I want to bring that to people’s attention — that what Zionism and the West say about Palestinians is not rooted in reality. 

You told me that one of the questions you’ve been asking or addressing in front of audiences is simply “What is a Palestinian?” Why this question? 

Usually when I ask the question, “What is a Palestinian?”, the room goes quiet. Like, what’s coming? What is this guy going to say? I don’t think it is something a lot of people think about. Even amongst Palestinians, there’s not really so much discussion about it, and understandably so. I can understand why Palestinians don’t focus on it so much, because they find the whole conversation so absurd and childish. They’re like, “Why should we lower ourselves to even respond to these absurd ancient historical claims when people are dying, people are being killed and displaced now?” I totally understand that. But I’m still harping on it because it’s deeply wrong and I think it’s this underlying issue that needs to be eventually confronted and unraveled.

How are you answering this question now? 

Palestinians are the sum total of all the indigenous populations that have ever been in Palestine, also including ancient Jewish populations who later converted to Christianity and then Islam. Like a cross-section of all the peoples who’ve lived there. That’s a major part of our makeup. Once people know that, it’s a little bit hard to look at it the same way. We’re so used to just saying, “they are Arabs, they arrived after Muhammad.” They don't know that in the early days of the Arab empire, only a small portion of the population was ethnically Arab. The rest were the local indigenous populations, speaking other languages. They defeated and inherited the Roman and Persian empires, and they took over the apparatus that was already there. It wasn’t until centuries later that Arabic became the predominant language of the local population. I'm not anti-Arab identity – it’s my identity. But people have to understand what that means. We act as if these current words that we have, like being French or German, are words that have always existed. No, these things are really fluid, and until you understand the fluidity of it, especially in the Middle East where the time scale is so deep, then you're going to be getting the wrong picture of who you’re even talking about. What they’ve done with the Palestinians, they’ve created this image of them as recent newcomers from Arabia. And I’m sorry, they’re not. They’re a blending of all the populations that have been there since the time of the Canaanites. 

Would you say your music is drawing on this entire history, and in a way trying to mirror what you’re articulating about the deep history and complexity of Palestinian identity? Is your music trying to reflect that? 

The uncomfortable part of this whole discussion is that it gets on the border of talking about race. And I really don't like that. I don't think anyone likes that. The problem is, that’s been thrust upon us. If you’ve been dislodged from your house or had ethnic cleansing or genocide or a number of atrocities practiced on you based on a certain claim, you have to debunk it. I think that if there was a deeper conversation about this particular subject, about who the Palestinians are – that we’re a composite of Canaanites, Jews, Israelites, Philistines, Phoenicians, even Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, – then you can’t just then pry them away and deny their connection. That’s a very deep connection they have to the land and their way of life. You just see it through a different lens then. Actually, you know what? What we just talked about, for me, is way more important than talking about my music. Seriously. It’s so important to me. 

 

 

 

Have you always tried to address these questions and topics in your music and as part of your performances? Or is that a recent development?

It's always been a really big part of my life. I have a drawing I would love to share with you. It’s called “Woman of Canaan” and it is based on an ancient Canaanite artifact of a female angelic figure. That was 20 years ago. So it’s always been a through-line throughout my life, of trying to keep that part of my obsession with that topic alive. It pops into my music here and there. But I guess I would sometimes suppress talking about it, even though I felt it was so important. Now I feel it’s really the time where I have to say something about it. 

What kind of reactions have you been getting from audiences when you bring up these subjects?

I've had some people come back to me and say, “that really made an impression on me when you said that.” Hopefully it does some good in the end. 

I know from our previous conversations that you haven't been performing as much in Germany since October 2023. Have most of these opportunities that you’ve had during performances to talk about this and ask these questions and educate people been outside of Germany, or have you also broached this subject in Germany?

I do not feel safe to bring up this particular subject in Germany. To talk about Palestine, the genocide in Gaza, or anything even close, is completely taboo here. Many artists, including myself, had concerts, exhibitions, all sorts of events cancelled. And then there’s the “silent cancellation” – not being invited anywhere to perform, when up until last year I was performing regularly throughout Germany. The reason is unspoken, but it’s crystal clear. Fortunately, in other places outside and especially in Canada,  I feel safe enough to do so and supported to speak out. So I do try to bring it up there. 

You have been living in Berlin – mostly in the city’s Neukölln neighbourhood – since 2011. Why did you make that move?

Every Canadian artist at some point reaches a kind of a glass ceiling. They can’t advance further, unless they’re mega famous. Being based in Berlin or Germany or anywhere in Central Europe, you can have an audience without being necessarily famous. Up until last year, I had a lot of interest and attendance at my concerts and invitations. You simply just can’t get that in Canada. 

How has your relationship to this city shifted over the past year?

Right now, it’s where I live, but it doesn’t feel like “home.” I’m traveling so much, so I’m sort of stopping here and I’m just being a homebody and trying to keep mentally healthy in an environment in this country that’s not very hospitable at the moment. The day-to-day opinions that you encounter on the subject of Palestine and Palestinians, if you don’t protect yourself from that and distance yourself from that, it can be really disturbing.

Berlin has one of the largest Palestinian communities in Europe.

And I'm in the middle of it. I’m living in the middle of Neukölln.

At the same, even though there’s the largest Palestinian diaspora in the continent in Berlin, this also seems like a place in Europe where anti-Palestinian, pro-Israel sentiment is the most pronounced. There’s this kind of strange tension.

And I feel that. Sometimes I end up staying in my own kiez [neighbourhood] here. And I know that there’s a duality to that. It makes you feel sort of protected. I don’t mean physically protected. I’m not worried about being physically attacked, generally. But emotionally, you feel protected. Kind of like it’s a blanket around you. But I also know that this kind of huddling mentality is not very good for getting out into the real world. It’s not clear to me what the way forward is. I don’t have a clear plan. I think a lot of people are just taking it day-by-day and seeing how the larger situation is playing out. I’m okay for the time being. 

I want to ask you about this one particular piece of yours called “Sonnenallee Fugue.” The name is quite evocative, especially if you know the city and if you know Sonnenallee. 

Sonnenallee, for me, is the throbbing heart of the city, where the soul is. I’ve heard other people, white European Germans, who would say, “oh, it’s like another country over there.” That’s mixed with a little bit of fear — bullshit fear — that if they come here someone's going to attack them, or something like that. I encounter that, especially in classical music. By the way, classical music is not as liberal and open-minded as everybody thinks it is. Basically, classical music started as court music. It’s as imperial as you get. 

 

 

 

Is that difficult for you to grapple with, as someone who has a love for classical music?

This whole experience has caused me to re-examine this thing that’s in my hands, this thing that I’m playing every day. What am I doing? I’m not gonna stop playing it and say that it’s imperialist, colonialist music – which actually maybe it is. Maybe it’s a statement in itself that I am who I am playing it. Maybe the way that I play it brings my own voice to it. I have my definite strong views in the way that I interpret the music, the way that I mix it with improvisation, the way that I do my own takes on it. I’m not here to preserve some cultural museum piece. When it comes down to it, everything is a tool for me to use. Even when I’m using breakbeats, using drum samples – whether it’s hip-hop or drum and bass or whatever – those are all tools for me, for my creative expression. 

I’m interested in this idea of improvisation as a way to challenge the conventions of classical music. Can you get into that a bit more?

I guess there’s a lot of duality in me. There’s part of me that loves to do meticulous planning and structure, and another part that is very impulsive and spontaneous. My concerts are like gigantic canvases where I’m painting an overall picture that ebbs and flows between those two poles. I love the idea of having a world within my music, to be able to have the “high culture” mixed with giant monsters and super zany cartoon characters and silly nonsensical things. One part of my concert that I did last year had a section where, right after I just finished playing a Bach fugue with electronics, I followed with some kind of Middle Eastern synthesizer improvisation, and then I followed that with samples of the Transformers and Godzilla mixed with howling wolves and owls and some low sub frequency stuff. What is that? You’re laughing but you're taking it seriously at the same time. For me, there’s no contradiction. Something could be ridiculous and still terrifying. 

Can I tell you about another thing? Another duality in myself? 

Sure, go for it. 

I am very, very easily embarrassed. I feel embarrassed very quickly, and self-conscious very quickly. However, I have a very, very high threshold for embarrassment, so I can tolerate feeling embarrassed most of the time. I’m even drawing some things recently, just to teach myself to do some figurative stuff, and it’s sucking so bad. I’m embarrassed by it, but I do it. I force myself to do it. And that applies to anything. I had the best concert of my life eight months ago in Toronto. There were so many little disasters that happened during the concert. There were parts where several minutes were failing. Why was it still the best concert of my life? Because of the overall effect of it. I would just go, “oh this is not working,” and I’d just move on to something else, or turn it into something. Sustaining the overall state of flow and creativity, and my own state of mind, that was much more important than if I had played it safe and tried to play a concert without mistakes. Then I would have got to the end but it wouldn’t have been as meaningful. 

Did the audience even notice that things were going wrong? 

I can’t tell. But there were some things that were obvious. And sometimes if there’s a really noticeable mistake I’ll just laugh out loud at myself. I’ll notice that something goes wrong with the electronics and you have to kind of laugh it off. Maybe that even helps in a weird way, in a way that we don't understand, helps you get to that space with the audience better. In Vancouver I had a computer crash. I haven’t had a computer crash in several years. But the ability to just sort of be like, “yeah this sucks,” and make a joke of it — then the audience could end up being a positive thing. Because then they’re like, “oh this is a real person.” They can relate to it, and oddly enough it brings us all onto the same pages.  It’s weird how that relationship with the audience is – I love it. 

 

 

 

I also see in this idea of duality and tension — in the ways that you're describing your performances and your music – as a connection between your drawings and your music. Somehow, I feel like your drawings are doing similar things. There’s so much going on in your drawings – you look at the whole picture and there’s so much happening – but then you zoom in and can see each intricate detail. 

Sometimes people express that they seem to capture sound. I think that’s true, but it’s not on purpose. I’m not trying to draw a sound wave. I just think that it’s a nice coincidence. Sometimes it’s just exercises in form. The idea is that it’s a stream that’s continuously going and I can’t do any wrong with it. Each drawing takes a little bit of the last drawing, whatever it is, so all of the drawings are interconnected. Sometimes they’re figurative, sometimes it might even be some ancient Babylonian motif, for example. Or it could be just that I wanted to play with rectangles and diagonal lines that day. They are kind of oddly musical, but I don’t intend them to be musical.

 

I noticed that you have been drawing a lot of olive trees and olive branches lately. Can you tell me a bit about this?

There was a period after the genocide started when I was so devastated that I thought, how can I make music? How can I make art? How can I continue making sounds and drawings like I was before, in the face of this? Another part of me felt a responsibility to do that because if we’re all silenced and we can’t do anything, what’s the work of an artist? So I was trying to force myself to do something, and the only thing that I could get myself to do was olive branches. That’s it. So I did a series of 20 of them, or something like that.

Why olive branches?

I was trying to address the situation that there were approximately 10 million olive trees in Palestine, West Bank and Gaza. And since 1967, at least a million of those, so one-tenth of them, have been destroyed – either burned, uprooted, destroyed in some way. In Gaza, there are barely any left. I want to draw people’s attention to that. The apartheid situation is like a monster with a thousand heads, and you could spend all your energy just fighting one of them. Let’s say one of those heads would be access to clean water, or transportation, or freedom of movement. It would just go on forever and ever, right? The population is being attacked psychologically, physically, financially, militarily, culturally, ecologically. So just to focus and bring people's attention to one thing – olive trees – which is the symbol of not only Palestinian resilience, but continuity, that the Palestinians are of the land. They’re not dominating the land. They’re not mastering or conquering it. They’re simply the people who have been there tending the olive trees and the fishing villages and slowly, culturally evolving like other communities around the world over time. 

I think that’s a beautiful place to wrap things up. Before we go, can you tell me about what the next little while looks like for you? It seems like you are spending more and more time outside of Germany. 

It’s an inhospitable environment [here in Germany].

But it seems like you do have some work outside of Germany. In the fall you were playing in Amsterdam and Malmö, you just played a concert in Amman, Jordan, and you’ve also had a few shows recently in Canada. I also know that you recently completed a residency at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. What is happening with that? 

I wrote the piece. It hasn't premiered yet, but it’s called “(In the Life of an) Olive Tree.” That is as close as I could get to addressing the Palestine situation to bring to their attention.