We sat down with singer, storyteller, and author Syna Awel to dive into her spellbinding release, “Arioul in Dub” (released May 29, 2026). Rooted in the rich traditions of Amazigh oral culture, Syna’s music serves as a vital bridge between ancestral memory and contemporary sound. Her journey spans from performing soul in Nice alongside Brazilian composer Marcus Cecconi to recording at Kingston’s legendary Tuff Gong Studio, commanding stages as the lead vocalist of Ifriqiyya Electrique, and sharing pivotal moments with the legendary Idir.
Directed by master Franco-Algerian drummer and percussionist Karim Ziad (Cheb Mami, Joe Zawinul), her debut album brings together an extraordinary lineup of musicians: David Aubaile on piano, Sylvain Barou on flutes, and Pierre Bonnet on bass. Together, they create an organic, hypnotic landscape where Kabyle pulsations, jazz harmonies, and dub production meet. In this interview, Syna shares how she translates ancient Berber tales into modern grooves, honors the power of the spoken word, and keeps cultural transmission alive for generations to come.
Interview with Syna Awel
Syna Awel: Oral storytelling and dub share the same logic: repetition, echo, the space left for silence. In the Amazigh tradition, a story is passed on in a loop, from one generation to the next, with variations every time it’s told. Dub works the same way. A motif comes back, it warps, it fills with echo and reverb. Arioul in Dub isn’t a betrayal of the original tale — it’s a new way of telling it, like a storyteller adapting the story for a different audience, or for a different time.
Syna Awel: Karim has this ability to make traditional rhythms speak with a more contemporary rhythmic writing, without either one ever crushing the other. He pushed me to leave more space inside the rhythm, not to fill everything in, to trust the silence between the pulses. That’s a lesson that comes as much from jazz as from traditional music.
Syna Awel: The breath is the ancestral breathing. The bass is the pulse of the present. That encounter between the two is literally my own position: a woman with two cultures, who carries an ancient culture inside her while living fully in the contemporary world — with no opposition between the two.
Syna Awel: The moment I set foot in Jamaica, everything reminded me of Kabylia. How open people were, how sociable, that very African sense of welcome — the landscapes too, and the musicians. Dean Fraser, who handled the artistic direction on the tracks I recorded there, behaved like a father with me. Sly Dunbar, the drummer, the same. And Sly & Robbie were like brothers. There was a real generosity between us. They could feel I was nervous, so they did everything to put me at ease. Not a trace of diva behaviour — great simplicity — and they’d often compliment me, as a way of encouraging me. It’s that same warmth, that same generosity, that I find in the spirit of dub: nothing is fixed, everything is passed on, everything is shared. Jamaican dub culture treats sound the same way — as a material to sculpt, a relationship to build, with foundations and respect for each person: you take things away, you let it breathe, you let the emptiness exist.
Syna Awel: That evening I was opening for his concert, and I admitted to him that I didn’t really dare sing in Kabyle. I was ashamed of my accent — having grown up in France, I was afraid of looking like an impostor to people from Kabylia. But I’d still wanted to sing at least one song in Kabyle, for him. He told me exactly the opposite: that I should sing even more in Kabyle, that my accent was my signature, the thing that set me apart from everyone else, and that the Kabyle people would be proud that a “French woman” felt so close to her roots. He added that it was when I sang in Kabyle that he’d felt my soul speak. That sentence is what gave me the right to fully exist in my own language — and I immediately had the album, a non-traditional one, translated into Kabyle by my father, almost in its entirety!
Syna Awel: Ifriqiyya Electrique is trance, raw power, a voice that has to carry above an electric mass to show the strength of that rootedness — a voice that heals, that frees, that gives raw love. Arioul asks for the opposite, but it’s another way of giving that same love, of healing and freeing: like the lullabies a mother whispers to her child to calm them down, when they’re crying over a scraped knee, when they’ve had a fright, or when they can’t fall asleep. It isn’t less energy — it’s the same force, carried differently.
Syna Awel: Yes — several of the pieces were conceived as chapters of a sound tale, a way of passing on the Kabyle language and culture to younger people without going through a history lesson, but through emotion and rhythm. The tale Arioul came out a few months ago as a children’s album, and it speaks to everyone, young and old alike!
Syna Awel: The piano becomes a second narrator. When the words escape a non-Berber-speaking listener, it’s the harmony that carries the emotional meaning. Sadness, joy, nostalgia come through in the chords as much as in the words — and David has a real gift for catching the emotion of the moment, staying with it, and telling the story alongside me.
Syna Awel: These genres are never treated as separate boxes, but as colours on the same palette. I write compositions that come out of my plural identity, so it happens quite naturally. Everything starts from the voice — the melody — and from the Kabyle rhythm; jazz and pop come along to dress it, without ever taking over.
Syna Awel: I hope the listener leaves with a sense of living memory — that Amazigh culture isn’t a frozen souvenir, but something alive, dancing, able to adapt to any environment and reinvent itself without ever losing itself.
Summary
With “Arioul in Dub,” Syna Awel proves that tradition is not a static artifact of the past, but a living, breathing force capable of reinventing itself across genres and generations. Guided by Karim Ziad’s brilliant direction and powered by a virtuoso band, Syna channels the oral power of Amazigh storytelling into a modern dub sanctuary. Whether through her youth literature or her hypnotic vocal compositions, her work remains a beacon of cultural preservation and artistic innovation. Be sure to stream “Arioul in Dub” across all digital music platforms today and explore the deep, rhythmic storytelling of Syna Awel!
