In conversation with Kiss Facility

as featured in Glamcult #143, the DEEPREAL issue

Intimate guitar strums and haunting vocal trills envelop you in a close embrace as you stroll your way through Kiss Facility’s discography. At the heart of their work is an intimacy and closeness — a feeling that shrouds linguistic meaning. From the very first encounter, their music captivated us with its soft acoustic murmurs whispering through sublime and swelling soundscapes. Singer/songwriter Mayah Alkhateri’s seductive musings put you in a trance– the Emirati-Egyptian’s mother tongue, Arabic, floats through a shoegaze dream produced by Salvador Navarrete (known to many for his solo work as Sega Bodega). Their combined creative pursuit showcases a dire hunger for the new–– equally matched by a passionate rejection of the established. Surrendering to chance and possibility, Kiss Facility dares to take risks regardless of convention and industry customs– Salvador’s label, ambient tweets, epitomise an approach to production which platforms the musician over the algorithm. Through their union, the duo are transcending cultural and sonic boundaries, blending experimental Indie Rock with traditional Middle Eastern ballads. They offer us art in its purest sense– art that not only feels alive, but asserts its own purpose and truth. Glamcult spoke to the pair in the midst of a mysterious debut album about language, matters of the human, and how creative authenticity — when rooted in connection — resists the chaos of simulation.

Hey, Kiss Facility! How are you guys doing?
Salvador: We finished our album — so that’s been exciting. We’re happy about that, just getting into the visual side of things now… that’s always a bit of a question mark.

Do you guys feel like you’re leaning towards building off of some of the visuals you’ve already done for the singles and EP release, or are you going for a completely new concept?
Mayah: No, it’s definitely a new concept.
Salvador: The whole album is sort of a mix and match of moods — we really want to make the visual world tie into the album, so it’s more about revealing it through the imagery first.

Love that — especially transitioning into fall, I feel like things get a bit darker, the music we listen to gets a bit broodier… Do you have a specific landscape in which you envision your work playing?
S: We love performing the songs live, so I can always hear it in a busy room full of people.
M: For me, personally, because of the lyrics, it’s very romantic. They’re full of sexual desires, so I can definitely see people playing a track like “Flesh Mix” in a very —
S: Sexy.
M: Ha-ha, romantic setting. Obviously, it’s in Arabic, so I don’t know if many non-Arabic speakers would clearly understand the concept. But I wrote the translation, and we have a lyric video for that as well.

I genuinely love listening to music in Arabic, even if I can’t understand it — it helps me feel connected to that aspect of my identity. I know the choice to sing in Arabic was a deliberate one, but how would you describe the role of language in your work?
M: I always wanted to hear shoegaze in Arabic. I had never heard it before, and now we can see more and more upcoming artists making this kind of music. Some people love it, some people hate it. But you’re always going to get that response when you do something different.
M: Pop and rap music are dominating the music industry in the Middle East, and in both genres, the vocals are so clear. But then I discovered bands like Slowdive and The Radio Dept., where the vocals function more to give a sense of feeling, rather than focusing on each word in the lyrics. Enya was my main inspiration — some of her songs are just their own made-up language. It is like an open-ended question that allows people to extract what they need.

Does Salv speak any Arabic? Do you think the language difference also influences the way you guys work together?
S: I wish I spoke Arabic — I think the difference just means I end up choosing the vocal take that sounds the best. Whereas sometimes I realise I’m actually choosing 1 out of 25 that maybe doesn’t even contain words at all, but it has the best feeling.
M: “Prayer at the Dinner Table,” for example, has a part that’s gibberish along with Arabic. I just think it’s beautiful to mix both worlds. Also, working with you, I never felt that there was any complication or anything like that. I always feel so comfortable, even if it’s a language you don’t understand.

GC: People gravitate towards music regardless of the language or enunciation. Still, as very intentional artists, I wanted to ask how you guys feel you assert this sense of purpose and personhood throughout your approach to the industry?
S: I mean, I don’t participate in the music industry. I don’t want to. I’ve never heard someone be fully entrenched in that world and be happy.
M: It’s because it stops being about the music and becomes more about money.
S: Plus, [at major labels] you end up in a queue with your music behind other people who need to release, and it’s like… I want to put this thing out when it’s done. With my label and supernature, it’s the freedom to release whenever we’re ready to go that I really appreciate.
M: I would rather do this than some bigger pop label because I feel like so many amazing young artists deserve support as well. And you supported them — obviously, I am one of them — and having that is very important. It’s a slow process, but it pays off.
S: It both can and can’t be. We’ve released one EP, and we’re so happy with its reception. It connected with way more people than I thought it would. People think the natural trajectory of a career is to start small and end on a major, and that’s the only way to do it. But if the music is going to connect to millions and millions of people, it’ll do so. It might not. What I want to start doing in the future is releasing the album first, seeing which songs become the natural fan favourites, and doing music videos for those top three. You know, guessing the single is always very hard.
M: I’m not going to lie, it would feel boring to predict the future — the unknown. I think there’s a sense of beauty in not knowing as well.
S: For the longest time, I really wanted to have that one song that was just everywhere — like, you can’t go five minutes without hearing it. But when I loved a song, and it got picked up like that, I ended up hating it. It just gets taken out of your hands…
M: It’s no longer yours.
S: I was also really thinking about the term “releasing” your music, as opposed to “sharing” an album. Release really suggests to free it away from you. When you release an animal, it’s gone from you. And it really is that… the word is actually so accurate.

There’s also just a layer of intimacy that comes with being able to nurture something so closely, only to set it free. It really is a labour of Love. I can imagine there’s so much of that throughout the work, with you guys living and working together in your apartment in Paris. What is it like finding a balance between work and domesticity?
S: We definitely incorporate our normal life into working because it’s just a desk in the living room. Mayah can sit in her room and write her lyrics, but I’m very much just on the laptop all the time. But it doesn’t feel like I’m ever at work — it feels like I’m in the project.
M: Which, like, you are a workaholic. You’re always working on a million projects at the same time. In terms of working on the Kiss Facility with you, I love making melodies and recording voice notes on my phone. I just see which ones work as songs, and we pick them together. But we also open our place to friends when they come to the city! It feels like more of a creative space where we get to work together — whether it’s music or photo shoots, or any other projects. It’s been great in Paris.
S: We’ll have like six different friends who don’t know each other, who we’ll think “Oh, they should meet,” and then we’ll just have them all over. I think plenty of new friendships come from our matchmaking.

I think that in an increasingly on-screen world, being able to foster relationships in such a material way is just so fulfilling. It’s also just emblematic of human curation and how we can intuitively identify when individuals would get along with each other! I wanted to ask how you guys try to reinforce the feeling of the human behind the music in your work?
S: Well, the feeling of a human behind the music died a while ago. The Pop music on the radio has been just repurposed old music from the 90s and early 2000s. I call it ref-pop (reference pop). That, to me, is worse than AI. I mean, AI music is God awful, but the feeling of a soul behind the music died the minute pop stars could be fast-tracked to stardom. You can feel it in a lot of younger artists… I feel like they don’t want to take the risk. Where’s that gone?
M: Some major pop artists never even go to the studio. Obviously, not all of them, but some won’t write their own songs or even sing them, and have AI of their voice instead.
S: AI is not the only contender for a lack of heart in music, or a lack of risk-taking, or a lack of originality. So when I see people talking about AI, I just see it as another avenue to be lazy as hell. If they were referencing something obscure, it would be kind of interesting… I love it when trance music takes inspiration from classical music, or when trap takes from indie songs.
M: I am in love with Arabic, Persian, and Turkish music! The melodies always hit. We also try to explore and experiment with different sounds. Some of the songs we’ve been working on are very different from our past indie ones. We’re going to keep exploring as much as we can until we no longer have any ideas. I just want to keep making different things because it feeds my soul.

I love this synergy — and with music being such a unifying force and able to offer comfort and support through this insane timeline, I think it’s also just so special to be able to exchange it so freely. Mayah, I know you’ve said that you want people to feel inspired to hope after listening to Kiss Facility — are there any personal, professional, or political hopes you guys would want to speak into existence?
M: I will always support my people. I will always push Arab artists forward, and try to give hope to my people and translate our grief and anger into hope and love. I will always try to represent us in a powerful way, and ask the same of artists like me in the Arabic Indie world. And Free Palestine, it’s crystal clear what’s happening.
S: You’d think. But somehow, today, there are teenagers on the internet who think 9/11 is fake? You can have something filmed from a thousand angles, and people will still say it didn’t happen. So we need to change the way people think.
M: It’s definitely not an easy thing to do, but we need to collectively promote hope and an end to the violence. We need peace.
S: You can just find entertainment and distraction so quickly now. I think people are resigned to fighting back because “it’s bad, but it’s not that bad.” It’s only when you’re fully being bombed that you’re like, “Oh. Something has to be done.” But at that point, you’re fucked.

You’re both right… I think that while we’re obviously dealing with the aftermath of so many systemic issues culminating all at once, maintaining hope is still so important. Even if I won’t see the changes I’m fighting for within my lifetime, it’ll all be worth it in service of whoever comes after us. Hope for the future extends far beyond ourselves. That being said, I’m sorry to have ended this interview on such a heavy note…
M: That’s life, as well.