Ayman Rostom has been making music with a computer for donkeys’ years, adopting an early Mac and never looking back. He’s worked under several aliases to make music in different styles over the past three decades (jazz, hip-hop and more), but his The Maghreban moniker has garnered the most attention, with its genre-bending idiosyncrasies. Here he delivers a lesson in mixing styles, influences and technology with top advice to turn what might just be ‘pissing around’ with software into one of the albums of 2022. Of Connection, Ayman says: “I’m proud of the music and where I was able to go with the help of my collaborators. There are jazz, eastern and techno influences. They converge differently on a few of the tracks. I am happy with how it all fits together.”
1 How did you start out in music production in the first place?
I’ve been making music for a while under different names and in different genres. Under my own first name, Ayman, with my first jungle records in the ’90s, then as Doctor Zygote making hip-hop in the ’00s and as part of Strange U (a long time collaboration with rapper King Kashmere); and more recently as The Maghreban, my dance music project. I grew up in Guildford, which is near enough to London to benefit from some of the cultural stuff seeping out, but far enough away to have its own thing going on. An older brother and his friends helped funnel some of that stuff in my direction. A load of ’80s pop, watching Breakin’, The
