Kiss Facility open the vault onto a universe of love, sexual desire and becoming

There is a particular kind of intimacy in being understood beyond the literal. When language, voice and instinct blur into one another, something more visceral takes over. Across the music of Emirati-Egyptian singer-songwriter Mayah Alkhateri and Irish-Chilean producer Salvador Navarrete, otherwise known as Sega Bodega, feeling is given multiple forms. Alkhateri sings in Arabic, her voice tender and mesmerisingly expressive, while Navarrete’s production moves between distortion and softness, electronic pressure and something altogether more dreamlike. What emerges is not a meeting of two opposite worlds so much as a third one belonging entirely to Kiss Facility.

Within that world, identity is less something to declare than something lived. Culture, femininity, desire, vulnerability and becoming surface without turning into subjects that need to be explained; they simply belong to the fabric of the music. Perhaps that is what makes space seem so important to Kiss Facility: room for all of these things to exist openly, on their own terms.

On their latest album, that space has a name: Khazna. Arabic for “safe” or “vault”, the title holds something personal for Alkhateri: a place for the feelings, desires and expressions of affection she once learned to keep guarded. But Khazna is not simply about what has been hidden. It is about what becomes possible when those things are finally given somewhere to exist — openly, instinctively and without shame.

A ‘khazna’ is a safe: somewhere we keep what is precious, private, or too important to leave exposed. What made you want to open yours to the world?: Mayah Alkhateri: Particularly where I grew up in the Middle East — and I can only speak from my own experience as a Khaleeji girl (girl from the Gulf) — it was really hard to show affection to family and friends. There was always an idea of eib (shame) around it. Like, it could be shameful to hug your brother or kiss your mum. Then I started living abroad and meeting different people. Salv and I have been together for four years now, and through him, my friends and people around me, I started to realise — and it sounds cliché — that when there is love around you, everything in your life starts to become better. Love also comes with honesty with yourself and communication with other people. I think that’s what I wanted to express with Khazna. There were things that had been kept away, and now I’m trying to share them through sound, lyrics and visuals.

I think a lot of Arab women will recognise that duality: intimacy and closeness can run deep, while desire remains private. You become fluent in different selves — with family, in love, with friends, abroad or back home. How has Khazna allowed all those selves to exist together?: MA: Sexuality and love can be difficult subjects, particularly for women in our region, although I’m sure men experience that too. It can be difficult to feel free to be who you are in your sexuality, and that can cause a lot of identity crises and mental health issues. Unfortunately, not everyone understands that yet, although I think people are becoming aware of it. For me, singing has always been a form of release. I sing in the shower, I sing when I’m sad — everyone has coping mechanisms, and singing is mine.
With Kiss Facility, I found a way to release those things through music, and through the process of making it with Salv, there’s a sense of healing. Not just for me, I hope it can be received that way by other people too. Before Khazna came out, I was worried about how people would take it, especially Arab listeners. But once it was out, I realised we’d found our own little community around Kiss Facility. The people who listen to our music feel like people I could be friends with. It’s a family and I feel safe.

When you’re building a track together, at what point does it stop feeling like either of your ideas and start feeling like Kiss Facility?: Salvador Navarrete: It’s hard to say, it’s just what feels good. Some songs, like “Kotshena” and “Magenta”, felt quite far away from what Kiss Facility had been before. But we wanted to be able to do that — to make fully electronic music as well as rock music. If you allow yourself that range, people start to understand that you can do all those things. For us, it’s really just, do we like this as a song? Regardless of whether it might be a surprise or feel outside of what we’ve done before, if we like it, we do it. Sometimes you can tell when an artist tries a new sound and it feels dishonest, like it’s coming from a desire to become bigger or to compromise. People don’t connect with that. For us, it just has to feel good.

How do you let someone all the way in without losing what belongs only to you?: MA: By boundaries and limits, and just understanding and being aware of where to draw the line when something starts to affect how you see yourself or lose yourself in that way.

SN: I’ve always felt that to really know someone fully is to be able to love them fully. I mean, it’s never really been an issue for us. There are so many sides to a person, though, and it takes a long time to really know someone. People change, you grow, you want different things, you find different interests. Life is never static. You can get to a place where everything feels stable, and then something dramatic happens, and you have to learn something new. That’s one thing I’ve learned about life: everything changes all the time.

Mayah, there are so many ways in Arabic to love, long, ache, desire — feelings that can collapse into a single word when translated into English. Can you think of a word you’ve used in your music that holds something you can’t quite translate?: MA: I really struggle with translating my lyrics most of the time, but there’s one word I remember asking all my Arabic friends to help me translate, and to this day I still haven’t found anything that really comes close: dala’. The closest I could get was “spoiled”, but that sounds negative. It’s more about being feminine… I still don’t really know how to translate it properly.

Editor’s note: depending on the context دلع / dala’ can suggest being pampered, coquettish but also a distinctly Arab mode of femininity, flirtation and seduction — a kind of softness, charm and playfulness that doesn’t have a direct English equivalent.

Salv, when you can’t access the literal meaning of Mayah’s words, but you’re building the music that carries them to the listener, how do you protect what’s inside them?: SN: The lyrics have never been something where I feel like I had to adapt the sound to them. There’s a complete trust in what each of us does. Of course, Mayah tells me what the lyrics mean, but most of the time, the songs are made completely together — we’ll be working on chords, and she’ll come up with melodies there and then. With “We Share A Dream”, we’d already made the instrumental when I found a voice note she had recorded separately, without ever hearing the song. You can actually hear the washing machine in the background because Mayah was just saving a melody, not trying to record a proper vocal. I put it over the instrumental and it just worked.

In “Flux”, there’s a line that says, “You can see my recklessness in my coldness.” It feels like a contradiction that could describe Kiss Facility itself.: MA: I actually don’t think of it as a contradiction, because as humans we’re full of so many things. We can embrace so many sides of ourselves and still love each side. When I wrote those lyrics, I was thinking about the side of me that was unloved, and that’s why it went down that road. By the end of the song, it starts to reach somewhere else — it’s kind of like a story. Most of my lyrics are more like a dialogue between me and myself or with other people. But I see what you mean — that theme of contradiction in our lyrics speaks to how my mind works. It’s literally how I end up living inside my brain.

Do we have to express every part of ourselves to be fully ourselves?: SN: When you see people reach a certain level where everybody knows everything about them and their private lives, it sounds terrible. I really control which parts of myself I tell the world and which parts I don’t. I’ve worked with people who have those kinds of fans, and sometimes my DMs will be flooded with messages asking me to tell them something or send them something. There’s a real problem with the way fandoms think it’s okay to speak with artists and how quickly they can turn on them. It’s a parasocial thing that’s gone out of control. That’s the problem with social media: you think you know someone. I would never trade what I have now. I’m busy, I get to make music, I have the freedom to do what I want and I also get to be quite private. It’s the balance I’ve always wanted.

MA: I’ve always been private. What you see on social media is maybe one percent of me. Privacy is very important to me. Even though I’m speaking about sexuality and love on the album, I’m not really scratching beneath the surface. It’s still a general view of those things, with a touch of myself in there. But it is freeing to send a message that you might previously have been uncomfortable sharing. I feel privileged to have that freedom and to be able to pass those feelings on to other people. Sharing them can help someone else, but it can also help me. We help each other in that way.