Acid Arab

Artist

Acid Arab
Agent

André Marmot
Based

Paris, FRA
Label

Crammed Discs

Images

PRESS PACK

For more than a decade, Acid Arab has been building one of the most distinctive signatures in the French electronic music landscape. Born out of Paris’s club culture, diasporas, and constant cultural exchanges, the collective has created a unique musical territory where machines converse with the voices, modes, rhythms, and imaginaries of the Arab world, the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean.

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Acid Arab

Since their first releases on Versatile, followed by the albums Musique de France, Jdid, and ٣ / Trois on Crammed Discs, Acid Arab has established an instantly recognizable aesthetic: powerful, physical, and precise electronic music infused with trance forms, traditional vocals, percussion, acid lines, and melodies from beyond Western borders. The collective’s music is built on a simple idea: allowing electronic production and the musical traditions it engages with to coexist on equal footing, within a shared language designed for clubs, live performance, and attentive listening alike.

This approach quickly gave the project an international dimension. With more than 600 performances around the world over the past ten years, Acid Arab has travelled from influential clubs to major festivals, from Rex Club and Nuits Sonores to London’s KOKO and Fabric, Fusion Festival, Ibiza’s Cova Santa, Les Eurockéennes de Belfort, and countless stages across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, the Americas, and Asia. On stage, the collective delivers an energy that is both direct and hypnotic, capable of bringing together vastly different audiences through a shared movement.

Acid Arab’s trajectory has always been shaped by encounters. Certain voices have become landmarks within its universe, such as Sofiane Saidi, who has been present since the collective’s earliest defining chapters and has returned to accompany several key moments in its repertoire. Other collaborations have opened new directions: Yasmine Hamdan, one of the most influential figures in contemporary Arab music, extends a dialogue initiated years earlier through Resonance; Wael Alkak brings a percussive and politically charged intensity rooted in Syria; Ghizlane Melih connects the memory of Moroccan musical traditions with a contemporary electronic sensibility. With Cem Yıldız, Acid Arab found a natural point of contact with Turkish traditions and trance forms, while Cheba Ibtissem, Ghita Lahmamassi, Radia Manel, Zeina Aftimos, Dalia, Rita L’Oujdia, and Cheikha Hadjla further expand this vocal cartography.

This musical geography is more than a collection of guest artists ; it lies at the very heart of Acid Arab’s identity. Each collaboration subtly shifts the project’s centre of gravity, adding a language, a colour, a tension, and a different way of inhabiting dance music. It is what allows the collective to move from a track carried by a major contemporary Arab voice to a more
pop-oriented encounter with Edis on Yaktın Beni, or to a more cinematic presence with Najwa Nimri, without ever losing its identity. Acid Arab remains the point of convergence: a space where voices circulate, respond to one another, and become electronic matter.

Alongside these collaborations, the project has maintained an ongoing dialogue with several generations of producers and remixers. R3HAB, Yuksek, Chloé Caillet, KiNK, NTO, and LB aka LABAT have each extended Acid Arab’s universe towards other scenes, spanning house, techno, indie dance, and French club culture. The collective has also revisited Rachid Taha’s Barbès, a landmark of Franco-Algerian music, as an act of both tribute and transmission.

With their upcoming album Resonance, Acid Arab opens a new chapter. The record continues the collective’s founding obsessions ; dance, trance, voices, sonic precision, and encounter ; while embracing a broader and more contemporary form of songwriting. For the first time, the production process benefits from an external perspective, bringing new depth to the sound and to the treatment of textures. Surrounded by a wide range of collaborators, Resonance presents an Acid Arab in motion: faithful to its language, yet open to new contours and dimensions.

In 2026, Acid Arab crosses another frontier with the original soundtrack created for Hassan Hajjaj’s exhibition at the Philharmonie de Paris. This encounter with Hajjaj’s visual universe naturally extends the collective’s artistic gesture: creating dialogue between images, bodies, popular cultures, icons, and music within a shared living space. It accompanies a significant
new phase for Acid Arab, marked by fresh collaborations, international performances, and the prospect of a future headline show at Paris’s Zénith.

Today, Acid Arab stands as a rare project: a French electronic collective that is simultaneously club-oriented, live, cultural, and international; a music of celebration, rootedness, and movement that does not seek to illustrate the world, but to make it resonate.

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Acid Arab