Arénas is a contemporary reimagining of North African Jewish music, where traditional Moroccan textures meet electronics, horns, and sampling.
Shaped by migration, memory, and the energy of the diaspora, the album draws on the artistic worlds of Neta Elkayam and Amit Hai Cohen, alongside influences from New Orleans. Across seven extended tracks, Arénas unfolds as an immersive, trance-like listening experience.
Echoing her grandmother’s birthplace in Tinghir, Morocco Elkayam developed an intimate dialogue with her ancestral memory, writing lyrics through cyclic structures and repetition, and choosing her mother tongue—Moroccan Arabic—as the language of her art. In close collaboration with musical producer Amit Hai Cohen, the music was co-written and composed, taking shape through a blend of electronic and acoustic instrumentation. Both trace their family roots to Amazigh villages in Morocco, and this shared lineage runs through the album as an ongoing inquiry—a listening process moving between memory, distance, and transformation. This process of imagined dialogue led to Arénas, transforming oral traditions into a contemporary sonic creation.
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Arénas takes its name from the Arénas transit camp in Marseille, where thousands of North African Jewish families once paused between the world they had left and the unknown ahead. Years later Elkayam encountered rare reel-to-reel recordings made in the camp in archives in Jerusalem. Recorded by folklorist Prof. Yissakhar Ben-Ami, these tapes captured women’s voices, songs of death and life, fragments of migration, hums, broken melodies, and crying babies.
“Just before the fall,” Neta explains, “Not here, not there—a temporary pause between past and future, a kind of vacuum. I found refuge in the transit camp ‘Arénas’ in Marseille… a trembling sentence, a voice—continued to echo in my head, creating an avalanche of new words. This is how the Arénas music project was born.”
New Album Out May 7th On All Digital Platforms Vinyl Release TBA Stream/Download Here
About The Artists
Neta Elkayam is an internationally acclaimed singer and multidisciplinary artist working with her North African Jewish roots through a contemporary, diasporic lens. Moving between Morocco, Jerusalem, and New Orleans, she creates a musical language that bridges geographies, histories, and identities.
Drawing from Andalusian, Chaabi, and Amazigh traditions, and singing in Moroccan Arabic, she centers a female voice within an evolving practice. Arénas is her first project focusing on Amazigh musical traditions from the Atlas Mountains.
Artist Amit Hai Cohen, producer and composer of Arénas, draws on the traditions he and Neta grew up with in the Moroccan Jewish community, developing a fluid sonic language that blends synths, sampling, beats with bendirs, and New Orleans-influenced horns, placing Neta Elkayam’s powerful voice at the center, while shaping a renewed, personal approach to their shared roots.
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