Nooriyah is Building a Global Community on the Dance Floor

People have got married because of a party Nooriyah threw. Not many, but atleast one, and she knows about them because they come and tell her. Others stop her to say they met three years ago on her dance floor and are still best friends. When we asked what it feels like to have built the thing those stories happen inside, “it brings me to tears sometimes,” she says. “It’s not even about what was created. It’s about what happens on the dance floor.”

The party is Middle of Nowhere, and she started it to settle an argument. Promoters had told her nobody would buy a ticket to hear music from the SWANA region sitting alongside everything else in the world, so she booked a room for 175 people to find out. It sold out immediately. It now holds five thousand.

She was born in Saudi Arabia, raised in Japan, and has been based in London for more than a decade. Her 2022 Boiler Room, the first SWANA line-up Boiler Room UK had ever put on, has passed four and a half million streams. She has played Glastonbury and Nitsa, sold out KOKO, EartH, Jazz Cafe and Colour Factory, toured Europe under the banner Middle of Everywhere, and produced a BBC Radio 4 documentary about the sounds our ears overlook. She mentions none of it. She is too busy reporting on the weather, which is good today, and which delights her. “Look, the sun is existing,” she says. “So it’s pretty good.”

“I never knew that somebody like me, from a small town in the eastern part of Saudi Arabia, would be able to do music as a career.”

The earliest memory is a room with good acoustics. Her father would take his oud, which she describes for us as “a pregnant guitar,” into the bathroom and play there, for the reverb. “Whenever I came home I always wondered where my dad was,” she says, “and he was always in the bathroom playing his instrument for the echo.” He had, she says, such a big and pivotal role in her love for music.

What he could not give her was the idea that it might be a job. That part was unavailable. “I always thought of it as a sort of joy in the background,” she says, and when Favour asks whether the music culture around her at the time had something to do with that, she is precise about the several reasons it did.

“There was zero infrastructure for it to be a career. And there’s a whole societal emphasis, and I’m sure we’re similar in this way, on being an engineer or a doctor. Being a woman is a whole other factor.”

She says the word impossible twice. Not difficult, not unlikely. Impossible. Then she notes, without much ceremony, that she now returns to Saudi Arabia to play music festivals as a Saudi woman, which she never imagined would be available to her. The distance between those two facts is roughly the length of her career, and she covers it in about fifteen seconds.

Three countries went into the sound, and she has a good line ready for how she carries them. “I feel like I carry all of them with me,” she says, “like a bag full of vinyls.”

What follows is the most quietly argumentative thing she says all afternoon. She points out that the world pushes a narrative that Western music is the end of the conversation, including in music theory itself, and that the software most producers use quietly enforces it. “A lot of the musical software, Ableton and Logic, they really constrain an artist to think in Western musical theory,” she says, “whereas living in all these places taught me that all these other scales are just as beautiful.”

Japan gave her playfulness, specifically the note selection of anime, which she says has “a pep to its step.” Saudi Arabia gave her emotional range through its scales. “Whether you want to be elated or sad, or you’re yearning for something, we have a scale for everything,” she says, before catching the framing and correcting it midair: the word for these is microtonal, “but even that is a very Western spin on how to frame it.” London gave her UK garage and its basslines. “Combine that all together,” she says, “and that’s me.”

“All these other scales are just as beautiful.”

Her process begins with digging, across Bandcamp and SoundCloud and more specialist databases like Anghami, where a lot of Arabic-language music ends up. The selection criterion is not technical. “Anything that makes me pull a face, I download it immediately,” she says. “If I feel like I smelt a fart while listening to something, it’s getting downloaded.”

From there it becomes a crate, then a story, organised by key and tempo but mostly by feeling. Then she takes it apart. “I look at music as a blank canvas,” she says. “Even though someone else created it and they might feel like I desecrated their work, I just look at it like play-doh, something to restructure how I want it.”

The finishing test is domestic and, once you hear it, completely sound. A mix is done when it can survive being ignored.

“It’s done when I can put it on while I’m cooking and it doesn’t alarm me. If it can be in the background and I can ignore it, that’s a good mix.”

I ask her what she inherited from her parents, and the first word she reaches for is bravery, which she attributes to the category rather than to them specifically. “I think any immigrant parent is inherently brave,” she says. “It’s brave to relocate your entire family not knowing maybe a soul in a different place like Japan, and still going for it anyway.” Then she connects it to the job she chose. “You need to be a little bit crazy to be in this music space, to go for it and take risks.”

From her father she also took the comedy. “He doesn’t say too much, but when he says something it’s just really funny,” she says, which lands differently once you have seen the Boiler Room, where he walks on in hatta and thobe, plays the oud, and thoroughly upstages the opening of his daughter’s biggest set to date.

Middle of Nowhere came out of irritation as much as ambition. London scenes were operating in bubbles, with the Arabic-speaking music world putting on its own events separately from everything else, and she could not see why. “All my friends have USBs with music that belongs to everything else in the world, the Latin music, reggaeton, dancehall, Afrobeats,” she says. “So why can’t SWANA music also be part of that USB?” It did not help that the parties she was being booked for bored her, or that promoters did not believe anyone would buy a ticket for what she was describing.

So she put on a party for 175 people to settle the question. It sold out immediately. The event now holds five thousand, and functions, in her phrase, as a curatorial playground: she will put SWANA and Caribbean collectives back to back and let the room work out that the joins are not where anyone expected.

“The cultures really dance together well, because rhythmically we’re actually more similar than different.”

What she values most is not the scale of it but the exchange. “To be part of people’s story in that way,” she says of the crowd it has gathered, “just as much as they are part of my story, is the most beautiful part.”

Partway through, she holds a record up to the camera, and it turns out to be one she is on. The album is To Be An (Arab), a vinyl-only double LP by the Iraqi-Canadian rapper Narcy, and across it Nooriyah plays an AI therapy bot called N.O.O.R., named after her, guiding Narcy through a self-directed therapy session about the music industry, cultural representation and his own manhood. Dave Chappelle, Talib Kweli, redveil and Ziad Rahbani are also on it.

I ask whether her voice was sampled and fed into a system, because that is the obvious assumption, and she says no with some delight.

“It was my actual voice. It was sort of a comical push against AI, by being the AI as a human, if that makes sense.”

She is also a serious vinyl collector, reads Arabic poetry with a particular fondness for Nizar Qabbani and the translations of Khaled Mattawa, and listens to percussion-forward music from everywhere as a way of getting into a culture sideways. “Drums are a really good entryway,” she says. The artists she names as current listening sit either side of a continent: Tay Iwar, the Nigerian singer and producer out of Abuja, and Toumba, who builds Levantine club music out of Amman. “The friendships around me,” she says, “really feed my musical world.”

I ask what a Sunday looks like when she is not working, and it becomes the most purely enjoyable stretch of the call. “I love questions like that,” she says, and then delivers the itinerary with the confidence of somebody who has defended it before.

“I’m waking up at 1pm. Nobody ask me no questions.” Then plantain and eggs, which she notes is her daily breakfast when she is home. Then the gym. Then her mother’s house, where she eats maybe three plates because her mother makes a lot of things, and then steals more food to take home and eat again. Then television, music, and dancing around her flat at two in the morning before sleeping. “It’s a very mindless day of eating and just existing,” she says, and the reason is straightforward: Friday and Saturday she was on a plane and in front of crowds she loves, and an off day has to actually be off.

When I mention that I am also a plantain-and-eggs person, she lights up, and offers the line that will probably follow her around. “A lot of my friends always wonder, are you sure you’re not Ghanaian? Because I have so much egg in my life.”

“I’m waking up at 1pm. Nobody ask me no questions.”

There is an EP coming in the new year, which she describes as carrying “so much of this cultural world, or the world that I built.” And there is a show at O2 Academy Brixton in April 2027, which she is already building now, more than a year out.

It will not be a DJ set. There will be dancers she performs alongside, live drumming, and what she calls theatrical elements. “You know when you go to the theatre and there’s a lot of storytelling? I want that. That’s going to be how the show is.” There will also, she says, be surprises, and declines to say more. Near the end she thanks us for the research, which she says she could hear in the questions, and hopes we meet in person one day. Then she signs off, and it is easy to picture what happens next, because she has already described it: a flat somewhere in London, something cooking, a mix playing in the background that she is doing her level best to ignore.