The story of Habibi Funk begins not in Cairo or Beirut but in Berlin, where a young record collector named Jannis Stürtz spent years haunting second-hand shops and chasing down obscure leads across North Africa and the Middle East. What he was piecing together was a sound the Arab world had largely forgotten, a body of music from the 1960s and 1970s that absorbed soul, funk, psychedelia, and Latin grooves, then filtered them through local sensibilities, languages, and heartbreak. Stürtz launched Habibi Funk Records in 2016 as a reissue label, but what he was really doing was making the case that this music deserved to be heard on its own terms, as something essential rather than merely curious.
