With pods in your ears, you saddle up your bike and play the film of your life: Charif Megarbane provides the right soundtrack to give even the most mundane situations a cinematic touch. But exactly how he does this is largely a mystery. The founder of Hisstology Records with a whole series of extremely listenable band projects everywhere from Canada to Kenya succeeds time and time again in this almost impossible balancing act between tradition-conscious funk with brilliant sampling from library music to crime jazz and the harmonic vitality of Arabic scales. Like trips on a magic carpet, his albums ‘Marzipan’ (2023) and this year’s ‘Hawalat’ (2025) sound like mixtapes full of pleasurable eclecticism and transcultural ideas. Whether on headphones or in a live context: As a gifted multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and producer, he travels with his audience through recent music history – past the stations of Western soundtracks and exotica annals via the lounges of Malta to the beaches of Lebanon. World music in the truest sense of the term.