"I was in this tiny room with a huge Funktion-One sound system," Yazan Zyadat, AKA Toumba, told me last December. "That was my first interaction with dubstep. I remember just standing there for four hours, not even moving, standing in front of the subs. Then I looked around and was like, 'What the fuck was that? I need some of that in my life.'"

This story could have come from many London or Bristol artists going back to, say, 2005—you don't forget the first time you felt subs rattling your teeth. But for Zyadat, who grew up in Jordan, this sensation came much later, in 2017. He was instantly hooked and started digging through discographies and absorbing as much as he could, doing the hard work before picking up DJing casually shortly after. He didn't start making music until three years later, in 2020. Two years after that, he landed a release on Hessle Audio, any dubstep kid's dream label.

"Petals," the lead track, was a shot across the bow. He had earlier releases (including a stellar All Centre EP), but this was something new entirely. "Petals" is a take on South Jordanian music that sounds like UK funky tailored for the Hessle Audio universe. In a review at the time, I wrote that, "A Hessle Audio EP is probably a dream for most producers, but in this case, I'd say the label is lucky to have Toumba." Needless to say, I was stoked, along with the rest of the dance music world. Zyadat has only grown in stature since, with an EP on Nervous Horizon, several acclaimed mixes and a debut album on the way, along with something of a musical makeover.

I had originally hoped to meet Zyadat in person in his hometown of Amman—a place that, as he's pointed out repeatedly, is closer and cheaper to get to than most people in the Western world think. (For him, the city makes an ideal home base for touring around Europe or the UK.) This idea was feasible until the events of October 7th, when Jordan essentially shut down out of solidarity for the Palestinian people. So here I was, squinting at Zyadat, who cuts a friendly, bear-like figure over Zoom, in his childhood bedroom, noticing a Jimi Hendrix poster on the wall behind him.

The poster intrigued me. Zyadat's introduction to dance music has been told so many times in interviews that it's practically his own little myth by now. A dubstep night. A dorm room. SHERELLE playing him a TSVI track ("Hossam") whose Arabic rhythms blew his mind. Things were never the same. But there was a life before that. "Growing up, I was like every other kid," he said.

In his productions, Zyadat wears his influences and his heritage on his sleeve, incorporating elements from Jordanian wedding songs to Arabic arrangement.

Zyadat's story is indeed familiar: he was in a musical family, picked up guitar at a young age and loved rock and metal, which eventually led him to aggressive electronic music like early Skrillex. He was always attracted to heavy, physical stuff that could make you feel something rather than just hearing it—no wonder he loved dubstep. After that formative night in 2017, he chased that feeling again and again, trying to trigger the same distinct physical and emotional response, like searching for your first high. He got into techno, but while at university in the UK he found more common ground with artists like Anz and SHERELLE, whose intricate rhythms and cross-genre explorations appealed to him. This experience turned his music taste on its head.

"Towards the end of 2019, I started messing around with production, and the first person I would send my tracks to was TSVI," he said. "I made my first track which he played on his Bleep mix, and after that I got really gassed. But I got lucky with that first track—because I kept on making absolute garbage for two years, until Tom and Josh from Hypnic Jerks hit me up and I started getting the hang of it." (Full disclosure: Tom Moon and Josh Chin work at Resident Advisor in non-editorial roles.)

Zyadat made his first tracks on his "friend's mum's Sony speaker," a humble setup that belies the genius that surfaced on his first two EPs, 115 on All Centre and Rosefinch, released on Hypnic Jerks. "I was obsessive. I put in ten, 11 hours a day, seven days a week, just listening to stuff that was good, watching videos on mixdowns, and sending stuff to [Canadian producer] Nahash—he taught me a lot when it came to mastering and mixing. I owe a lot to him."

Nahash and TSVI come up repeatedly if you talk to Zyadat about music for long enough. He gravitated towards TSVI particularly because of the Arabic-style metre he noticed on "Hossam." "I just didn't hear that kind of stuff anymore," he said, referring to his time in the UK and a more general move away from his homegrown musical culture. "And it works so well because so much Arabic music is made to make you move—it's not meant for you to just sit down and listen to it. When I heard TSVI's track, I was like, 'Why hasn't anyone done that before?' Obviously there were people who had done it before, but I was just so excited. It just made me want to make music."

"Now, I'm branching out," he said. "There's a lot for me to say that I couldn't say with what I was doing before.".

While Toumba heard fragments of himself in music other people were making, his audiences, especially in the UK, didn't know exactly what to make of him at first. "When I first started, everyone was like, 'What are you doing,'" he said, laughing. "'What is this?' When I DJ'd people considered it completely leftfield. I couldn't appease the breakbeat crowd, the techno crowd or the dubstep crowd, because it wasn't dubstep enough or whatever. But as time passed, people picked up parts of this kind of music. And it wasn't just Middle Eastern music, it was music that isn't European. Kuduro, dancehall, you know."

"Unfortunately a lot of people would appropriate it," he continued. "I think it's cool to use parts of something, just don't make it your whole thing if it's not your music. But it's also kind of flattering to see people acknowledging how much these elements add to dance music, while also acknowledging that for them, it's learned and not lived."

For Rosefinch, Zyadat wore his influences and his heritage on his sleeve. He sampled a traditional Bedouin song in one track, and other times used run-of-the-mill synths and hardware but arranged them in an Arabic meter that makes them sound like what you might call "traditional" or "Middle Eastern" (even if people back home might think that was nuts). Later, Petals focused on different regions of Jordan, incorporating dabke, wedding songs and other strains of music and dance around him. Western music journalists often didn't know what to make of these tunes, comparing them to other like-minded producers like DJ Plead and (yet again) TSVI. But what made Zyadat stand out is that he grew up steeped in this rich culture.

"We needed a whole generation to leave the country, experience stuff and then come back, which is what's happening now," he told me. "It's a light bulb moment, collectively, for the whole region—a subconscious energy that everyone felt, even though we were far apart. We're all just doing this together now when we all started around the same time and started in such different environments around the world, it was crazy. They all just sort of accumulated at the same time, there was this sort of underlying solidarity. Everyone can feel it."

Over time, with new, self-taught production chops—Zyadat is nothing if not tenacious—and increased confidence, his music moved from a blend of disparate influences into something completely new. He approached UK-style leftfield club music with both an insider and outsider's ear, an often overlooked advantage of straddling two worlds. Where his first self-released EP bridged, in his own words, "between traditional folklore from Jordan and the Arabian Peninsula" and "the modern UK club sound," Janoob, his most recent release for TSVI's Nervous Horizon label, packaged his influences into cutting-edge club music that just happens to have Jordanian ideas in it, rather than being built around them. As Toumba, Zyadat is now about as insider as they get, closer to setting trends than following them.

"We needed a whole generation to leave the country, experience stuff and then come back, which is what's happening now."

"With my past music, I was interested in tempo changes, polyrhythms—all rhythm—but I neglected the melodic and textural side of things," he explained. "So I started listening to a lot more multi-sensory music—something that transports me somewhere else. I got all of Ian William Craig's stuff, and I like how Nazar uses his atmospheres. Plus a lot of the aya stuff, and Space Afrika. Personal experiences and the overall political climate made me feel more introspective and vulnerable."

You can hear the increased emphasis on textures and melody in Janoob, where the Levantine instrumentation and rhythms become subsumed into a more globalised form of club music. ("The stuff I'm making now, if you hear it, it has no resemblance to Arabic music," he told Mixmag at the time.) An even better comparison might be between his two most popular mixes. His Untitled 909 mix showed him at the height of his era-one powers, just prior to his Hessle Audio release, blending his own tracks with cuts from Danny Scrilla, Azu Tiwaline and Kanye West. Fast forward to his FACT mix in December 2023 and the focus is on emotion. Though there's hardly any dance rhythms at all, the two-hour mix is deeply personal and revealing, laying bare his love for everything from hip-hop to vaporwave. The shift wasn't an accident.

"Now, I'm branching out to home listening stuff," he said. "I'm singing on my tracks and working on an album that's very ambient with singing and live instruments involved. There's a lot for me to say that I couldn't say with what I was doing before. When I'm making dance music, usually I'm very obsessive about details and everything needs to be very refined. But there's not the same level of thought going into the music I'm making now, for like, 90 percent of the process. I ask myself, 'Is this what I want to do? Is this what I want to express?' And if it is, then I keep it. It writes itself. I've never tapped into something like this before. It's very liberating."

During our conversation, Zyadat's focus kept drifting over to his new work. I couldn't blame him—he's talked endlessly about the first few years of his career, about the influences that once made him seem novel, even exotic. He's already introduced enough people to the sounds he grew up around. He doesn't need to make it obvious anymore—as he says, if you know, you know.

"My newer music is much darker, much harsher, more distorted," he told me. "But also delicate. There's a big contrast between, like beauty and delicacy, and chaos. It's a hard balance to achieve, because they're intrinsically opposite feelings. If people connect with it, great—but I only really make it for myself at the end of the day."

"If you're an artist, and you don't really care or aren't affected by what's happening, you can't really call yourself an artist. You're more like an audio decorator."

Though Zyadat sounded excited, and a little tight-lipped, about the future, there was something of a pall hanging over our conversation. After all, he was meant to be playing gigs around Europe at this time. Instead, he was talking to me from his bedroom in a city that's been fundamentally rocked by conflict in its neighbouring countries.

"Just making music as someone who is living in this region is political," he said, pausing to choose his words carefully. "It doesn't even have to be about the war. If the music is heavily based on how you're feeling, it will reflect the political situation around you. If you're an artist, and you don't really care or aren't affected by what's happening, you can't really call yourself an artist. You're more like an audio decorator."

Zyadat isn't shy about loving and being proud of his home region. His most recent release was a six-track benefit EP called For Palestine, released just a week after Israel began bombing Gaza. And when he spoke about the situation it was with determination—to stay in Jordan, to seek justice and to try and make a difference, while still respecting the gravity of the moment.

"Living in Jordan doesn't complicate getting gigs, but it complicates things in the sense that I can't get myself to go to the club, or play music for people to dance," he told me. "Ever since the [conflict] started, I only took one gig, and that was purely to make ends meet. It's hard to keep going as if nothing's happening. Everything is shut. There's no parties, there's no events. The most you'll get is a film screening. Everything is put on hold, everyone's protesting, even restaurants are only selling Jordanian products."

He added: "The whole country has come together for the cause. It's a completely different climate now in every single aspect. There's a big shift in mood, and a shift in priorities—it's not just about me or dance music, everyone is completely different now. People will start to just have the heart to go about their normal lives when a complete and permanent ceasefire happens, but I don't think it will ever be okay—and it hasn't been for 75 years—until Palestine is completely free and occupation completely ends. But I will stay in Jordan until it's no longer feasible for me to stay here. I'll stay as long as I possibly can."