Yasmine Hamdan

Yasmine Hamdan is an icon of Arab underground music in part thanks to her first project Soapkills , a pioneer group of Electro Trip-Hop in the Middle East, which she founded with Zaid Hamdan in 1997. Yasmine Hamdan was born in southern Lebanon in the midst of war. Two weeks after his birth, his parents took refuge in France and the United Arab Emirates, Greece and finally Kuwait. However, they had to leave Kuwait during the Iraqi invasion in 1990. His father engineer then repatriated his family to Lebanon. In 1997, she began her career as an artist with Soapkills with her song in both English and Arabic, and the project was broadcast on Lebanese radio. She then moved to Paris and met her husband and director Elia Suleiman. Soapkills dissolved in 2005 on a last aborted album, signed on a French label that went bankrupt in the middle of the recording. She collaborated with Mirwais Stass (ex Taxi Girl), with whom she recorded Arabicology as Y.A.S. in 2009 and Cocorosie as The Moon Asked The Crow in 2010. Her solo career began in 2012, she worked for the occasion with producer Marc Collin ( Nouvelle Vague ) and as a result of this cooperation resulted in an eponymous album with felted instruments, in which the sensuality of the artist is fully expressed, all in different Arabic dialects. This first effort is remodeled to release in a new version in 2013 under the name of Ya Nass. Yasmine Hamdan plays and sings in Only Lovers Left Alive by director Jim Jarmusch. She plays her own role and plays a song she wrote for the occasion ( Hal ). She also composes the original music for the play Rituel Pour Une Métamorphose , by Syrian author Saad-Allah Wannous, given to the Comédie-Française in spring 2013. In 2014, Yasmine Hamdan made several tours in Europe and North America as well as in the Arab world (Lebanon, Tunisia, Jordan, Egypt...). Al Jamílat , his second album appeared in 2017 via Crammed Discs and Ipecac Recordings while a remixed version appeared in 2018.