Close to Home Sara Dziri

Optimo Music delights in teaming up with Sara Dziri for a single and album release! We are always searching for music that eschews the status quo so it took hearing just two tracks from her album, Close To Home to know we were all in for a release.

The single Fille de Racaillle (OM 49D) will be released by Optimo Music digitally on February 4th 2022.

The album Close To Home(OM LP 26D) will be released by Optimo Music digitally on March 25th 2022.

About her album, Sara says – Close To Home is a musical exploration of living in the in-between, with a need for belonging. Having shaped my identity between two very different cultures (European and North-African/Arab/Berber), I often had to deal with feelings of not belonging versus feelings of belonging. This differed based on the language I speak (ranging from Flemish to English, French to fluent Tunisian Arabic), the people I am with, the country or even the city I am in. Often this leads to me feeling very close to home, yet not completely home.

I don’t want to be put in the box of ‘Arabic influenced electronic music’ or West-Asian & North-African (WANA) music, though I find myself naturally working with these influences as they are part of my upbringing and musical palette. This album explores a wide range of musical genres beyond this one piece of identity, such as techno, trance, ambient, krautrock, darkwave to even orchestral music. It is not a marketing tool that tries to marry two things together to make it appealing to a certain audience, yet it is an honest representation of my musical universe.

I worked with Valentina Bellanova who plays the ney, which is a wind instrument that is very prominent in WANA music culture. This ney is the strongest representation of my Tunisian identity in this album, and I find it full of character and deeply emotional.

Sara is a DJ, music composer, producer, and performer and dived into and played many genres before tracing her musical journey through composition. The apprenticeship of music quickly became an opportunity to overcome the distance and differences between her two cultures (Belgian and Tunisian). This multifaceted identity helped her navigate the music industry and establish herself as a pillar of Brussels’ electronic underground scene in just a few years.

In 2019, she released her first EP ‘Glimpse of an Eye. During the same year, she played her first Boiler Room alongside Ellen Allien and Juan Atkins. Since then, she has performed at festivals such as ADE (2019), Nuits Sonores Brussels (2019, 2021), and Paradise City (2021). In February 2021 she released her second EP ‘Vague Realities’. She currently is a resident at Kiosk Radio, Tsugi Radio and Fuse, Belgium’s longest running techno club.

While pursuing her DJ and producer career, Sara also expands her portfolio as a composer and performer, having presented work in venues such as Kaaitheater, Bozar and Theater Rotterdam. She is also active within the electronic music community, co-founding Not Your Techno in 2019, a platform and party collective dedicated to bringing more diversity to the Belgian underground scene.