Shadi Megallaa’s Ark to Ashes is Abu Dhabi’s first vinyl-only label

Abu Dhabi-native Shadi Megallaa’s record label Ark to Ashes, one of the capital's first deep house record labels, rolled out its first release, The Ark Lives EP, earlier this year.

Shadi Megallaa. Courtesy Shadi Megallaa

It was a combination of necessity and nostalgia that sparked the idea to set up Ark to Ashes, Abu Dhabi’s first vinyl-only record label. The founder, Shadi Megallaa, born in Cairo and raised in Abu Dhabi, was living in Brooklyn when he decided to set up on his own.

“I was tired of shopping my music around to other labels and I noticed that I would start to make music with a certain label in mind, to fit with their sound aesthetic,” he says. “Not just that, it also became harder and harder to find music I wanted to play in DJ sets because a lot of the music coming out just all sounded very similar.”

Megallaa started out as a DJ in 1998 and his musical tastes remain loyal to early UK tech-house and underground sounds of the 1990s by the likes of Terry Francis and Swag Records. At the same time, old-school dub legends such as King Tubby were a lasting inspiration.

“That’s the music I loved and I couldn’t find it anymore,” he says. “I would DJ and go back to playing these old records and they sounded great, but no one else was playing them.”

In 2013, Megallaa moved back to Abu Dhabi and established Ark to Ashes. The decision to go vinyl-only reflects a certain sentimental defiance, which is also evident in the label’s name: Ark to Ashes is a reference to Lee “Scratch” Perry’s legendary Black Ark studio, which he decided to burn down in 1979 to “rid himself of the negative energies surrounding it”.

The first release, The Ark Lives, came out in November and its combination of dub-laced block-party sounds, courtesy of The Linguinis (Megallaa and his DJ pal Nadir Agha), with the return of the tech-house pioneer Grant Dell and a re-release of a nearly forgotten track by The Coastal Commission, was a winner with vinyl lovers in the UAE, the United States and the United Kingdom.

In April, Ark to Ashes presented its second release, Three Wise Men, a set of three cuts created by Megallaa and his friends and fellow DJs Taimur Agha and Fahad Haider.

With no digital sales and just 300 vinyl EPs per release, Ark to Ashes records are insider articles, made by DJs for DJs. But niche audiences are often also the most eager and both releases are already nearly sold out.

Now working on the third EP, Megallaa looks forward to initiating more links between like-minded artists in the US and the UAE. Much of his creative energy also goes into unearthing and conscientiously remixing eclectic sounds of the past. He recently acquired a tape deck to sample old cassettes he picked up on his last trip to Cairo from artists such as Umm Kulthum, Layla Murad and Farid Al Atrash.

If there is a guiding principle to the freewheeling sonic adventures of Ark to Ashes, it is not to create dance-floor fillers, but to expand people’s musical horizons.

“If all DJs play tracks that came out in the past two weeks, you’re all going to be playing very similar sounds, if not the same labels and artists,” says Megallaa. “So I try to find these old producers who haven’t made music for a while, whose music I love, and try to bring them back to this new generation of partygoers and DJs.”

Having switched Brooklyn for Abu Dhabi to support the family business, he mostly plays in Dubai these days. “I think Abu Dhabi will be much more culturally diverse when the Louvre and the Guggenheim open. I get a lot of inspiration from art and I’m really looking forward to that.”

• Available on juno.co.uk with delivery within a week