Berlin’s Habibi Funk Brings Arab Music’s Lost Sounds to Istanbul

The reissue label behind decades of rediscovered Arabic funk and soul joins Kazdoura for a night at JJ Pub Kanyon on September 11.

Habibi Funk, the Berlin-based label that has spent a decade tracking down and reissuing forgotten Arabic funk, soul, and jazz records from the 1960s through the 1980s, brings its DJ set to Istanbul on September 11, performing alongside the Syrian-Lebanese, Toronto-based duo Kazdoura at JJ Pub Kanyon. Founded by Jannis Stürtz in 2015 after he found a 1972 Moroccan cover of a British rock hit in a Casablanca record shop, the label has since released over 30 records, working directly with surviving artists or their families to relicense music that had otherwise fallen out of circulation across Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, and beyond.

What distinguishes the project from ordinary crate-digging nostalgia is its explicit awareness of the politics involved: Stürtz has spoken openly about the responsibility a Western label carries when handling non-Western artists’ work, describing the need to avoid reproducing the economic patterns of exploitation tied to the region’s colonial history. In practice, this has meant profit-sharing agreements with artists and a research process that can take months: locating a musician’s descendants, verifying rights, and documenting each release’s original context rather than simply repackaging it for a new audience.

The pairing with Kazdoura in Istanbul reflects the same instinct in a different generation: a Syrian-Lebanese duo reworking traditional Arab maqams through psychedelic rock and jazz, performing alongside a label built on unearthing the previous generation’s version of that same fusion. Both acts, in their own way, are engaged in the same act of cultural translation, carrying music across borders, decades, and audiences without flattening where it came from.

For CDF, this is cultural diplomacy in one of its quieter forms: an independent label and a diaspora duo doing the work of connecting audiences, generations, and traditions across borders, proof that dialogue between cultures often happens outside formal institutions, one record and one stage at a time.