Neta Elkayam - Arénas (2026)

Israeli singer Neta Elkayam and producer Amit Hai Cohen — both descended from Amazigh families in Morocco — created the album "Arénas," blending traditional Moroccan sounds with electronics, horns, and sampling, alongside influences from New Orleans music. Seven extended tracks form an immersive, trance-like listening journey through themes of migration, memory, and diaspora.

Elkayam's starting point was her connection to her grandmother's hometown, the Moroccan city of Tinghir: she wrote her lyrics in Moroccan Arabic, her family's mother tongue, structuring them through repetitive, cyclical patterns. The album's title refers to the Arénas transit camp near Marseille, through which thousands of North African Jewish families passed in the mid-20th century as they left their homelands. The project's spark came from rare reel-to-reel recordings Elkayam found in Jerusalem archives — made at the camp by folklorist Yissakhar Ben-Ami — capturing women's voices, songs of life and death, fragments of melody, and crying babies. These fragments became, for Elkayam, a "trembling sentence," an echo in her mind from which the entire project emerged. In this way, documentary traces of a transit space — "neither here nor there" — were transformed into a contemporary work of music, giving the diaspora's oral tradition a new electro-acoustic form.

Tracklist:
1. Neta Elkayam - Shrbil
2. Neta Elkayam - A Lalla Ya Ima
3. Neta Elkayam - Hawa Hawa
4. Neta Elkayam - Hna Jina
5. Neta Elkayam - Juj Njimat
6. Neta Elkayam - Ya Latif
7. Neta Elkayam - Tkun Mbarka