No one does disco quite like Dar Disku and their secret, it appears, is in the dig. From the souqs of Turkey to the bargain buckets of Bahrain, Mazen Almaskati and Vish Mhatre are out to find and refashion the buried gems that moved their parents’ generation. “A friend introduced me to a Turkish cover of Whitney Houston’s ‘I Want to Dance with Somebody’ and it’s a weapon on the dancefloor,” Mhatre tells us with quiet pleasure.
Roughly translated, Dar Disku means ‘home of the disco’ and takes its name from a 1970s Egyptian culture magazine. The collective came about in 2018 and specialises in a heady cocktail of wistful joy, releasing music makes you long for the past and grateful for the present. The project’s website states that they are “all things HiNRG, New Beat, Disco, Strange and Pure,” but perhaps Mhatre puts it more simply to us: “It’s essentially two best friends with a very geeky side project.”
Almaskati and Mhatre were raised in Bahrain, less than a mile away from one another, and attended the same pre-school. They were brought up on a healthy diet of western music and as their tastes evolved, from IDM and dubstep to indie and metal, they began to indulge in the other’s, swapping albums in the school playground. As teens, they did the rounds in local bands - Almaskati perfecting Slipknot covers, Mhatre tackling the chart toppers - and finally performed together at an end-of-year rock festival.
After school, Almaskati and Mhatre moved to the UK where they saw some of their favourite artists performing in the flesh for the first time. “The only people that would come to Bahrain to play were David Guetta or Avicii,” Mhatre says, drily. The first artist he saw up close was Benga, on his university campus, and it was a life-changing moment. “It was just so mind-blowing,” he tells us. “It’s one thing listening to a recording and another being in the middle of a soundsystem and having your brain blown out by it.”