INTERVIEW: MARTEL

Martel’s new album Zaire isn’t looking to offer comfort. Instead, it deals in friction, density, and the kind of political clarity rarely found in contemporary electronic music. Built around themes of exploitation, resistance, and cultural memory, the record draws a hard line between commercial detachment and artistic responsibility.

Across its shifting textures, Zaire is as physically arresting as it is morally charged, pushing past the safe abstractions often found in club music to arrive somewhere more confrontational. In this conversation, Martel discusses the album’s origins, the influence of place, and why baristas might be the last hope for DJ culture.

You’ve described Zaire as neither escapist nor spiritual, which pushes against how a lot of electronic music presents itself. Is there still space for difficult or confronting work within club culture?

Not really, but it has to be done before we all end up suffering the clubsterben where we then end up relying on Starbucks baristas to think of more creative playlists than DJs do. In ways, they’re already better, as the barista usually has something to say, whereas too many clubs have lost their character and money is their only goal.

There’s a physicality to the record, but it also carries a kind of moral weight. How do you hold that tension during the creative process?

It was spontaneous as an idea with Zaire, but ended up being a natural fit - political information, agitation and general fury against the injustice of an ever perpetuated hell the Congo goes through is a good state to be in when trying to tighten up a production into an atmosphere as dense as it is here.

Was there a particular sound or texture that unlocked the album for you, a moment where the project’s direction really crystallised?

Brazzaville - with that one I figured I will no longer care for conventions and that I wish to revisit the excitement that some new, but mostly older techno, used to have compared to what’s in the mainstream world right now.

You’ve lived in cities with very different cultural rhythms. Has your relationship to sound or space shifted as a result?

Of course, and it has built up a true multicultural tendency within myself. It’s a great position to be in, to be able to equally romanticize hours spent doing nothing around Orkney and enjoy the wind or to have reverence and a sense of participation when all of Cairo stops for prayer, and equally cherish and understand both moments.

Some parts of the album are almost beautiful, others feel intentionally jarring. Were you deliberately working with contrasts, or did that emerge more instinctively?

It’s a natural instinct in my case. Every track has to have a certain aesthetic quality and completion to it, but if that needs roughness of sonic violence to frame the picture, then any tool or style is fair game.

Were you listening to anything specific while making Zaire, or did you try to block out other influences and stay in your own world?

There was a bunch fo music around those days, but something about Sepultura and Laibach stuck with me those days, especially their Roots and Spectre albums respectively.

How important is it to you that this record works in a club? Would it matter if people only ever heard it on headphones?

Oh by all means yes, and it’s actually music designed for good speakers. I tire of digital productions finished in three hours and more so from electronic music that doesn’t breathe. Here I strived for something that’s like the sonic antithesis to a Steve Aoki piece - something that can ride the maximum out of a Funktion One speaker.

You’ve scored for games and films, where narrative tends to be more explicit. Is there a storyline to Zaire, or are you inviting listeners to bring their own meaning?

A story of a whole and a story of an experience, yes, but plot-wise, not really as it’s not supposed to function in a linear manner. However, expressing things through choices of sounds and injecting it all with specific details, there’s a ton of storytelling right there.

Power, extraction, survival: these ideas seem embedded deep in the music. Has working on Zaire changed your relationship to any of those themes?If anything, it has given me the confidence to not only continue to do so but to also inspire others to join the fight. Enough with the lethargic and the indifference already!