Diwon

Early life

Safar, an Orthodox Jew, is the son of an American Jewish father and Yemenite Jewish mother. He grew up listening to Mizrahi and Yemenite music. In 2003, he graduated from the University of Maryland, and moved to Brooklyn later that year.

Early career

Safar’s career in music began at the University of Maryland when he founded Juez, a breakbeat klezmer jazz quartet in which he played drums. That year, he also began performing under the moniker DJ Handler, spinning a blend of Hip hop, Afro beat and Arabic music. In 2004, Juez released their lone album, Shemspeed Alt Schule, on Modular Moods, an independent record label founded by Safar.

In 2007, Safar was named to The Forward 50, an annual list of the world’s most influential Jews, as chosen by the editors of The Forward. He was recognized for his work as DJ Handler, for heading Modular Moods, for founding and running the Sephardic Music Festival, and for that year’s formation of Shemspeed. That same year, in a cover story on DJ Handler, The Jerusalem Post called him “one of the top visionaries of young Jewish cool’s celebrated vanguard.”

Sephardic Music Festival

In an effort to introduce Sephardic music to a greater audience, Safar launched the Sephardic Music Festival in 2005. The seven-day festival takes place annually in December around Hanukkah at venues across New York City. The New York Times described the festival as having an "eclectic lineup of traditional and contemporary artists, including many dedicated to fusing disparate sounds or bridging new and old." Shemspeed has released two compilation albums, Sephardic Music Festival, Vol. 1 (2010) and Sephardic Music Festival, Vol. 2 (2012), featuring Middle Eastern-tinged tracks from a variety of acclaimed Jewish artists, including Matisyahu, Pharaoh's Daughter, DeScribe, Moshav and Sarah Aroeste.

Change of name

2008 saw Safar change his stage-name from DJ Handler to Diwon, a name inspired by the Yemenite book. (The diwan has meaning as a book of songs in Persian and Urdu.) "DJ Handler I started before I became a DJ, and I never felt like it was me — it never really fit," Safar said of the switch. "Making Yemenite music under the name ‘Handler’ sounded kind of absurd… and not in a good way."

Dreams In Static, Bonhom and solo work

In 2009, Diwon worked with New York-based guitarist Dugans to form Dreams In Static, which released an instrumental LP, Serene Poetic, on February 2, 2010. The Forward wrote that the album "occupies an otherworldly, post-rock, electro-instrumental universe." In 2014, after expanding to include vocalist Akie Bermiss, Dreams In Static released the single "You're On Your Own". Diwon produced the music video. The band plans to release a new album later in 2014.

DJBooth.net has called Diwon a "buzzmaking beatsmith" in reference to his collaboration with Kyle Rapps, the mixtape Tyrone Gosling, inspired by the 2011 Ryan Gosling film Drive. In 2013, Diwon released his debut album, New Game, along with the album's first single, "Games That We Play" featuring Jesse Scott and Barney Bones. Also that year, his Bancs Media released the compilation Endless Summer, with tracks from artists including RZA, Kosha Dillz, Kool G Rap and others. On August 20, 2014, he released the instrumental album Pre-Game.

Diwon and James Coleman make up the pop group Bonhom. They released the single "Live for Now" in 2013.

Israeli keffiyeh

In January 2010, Diwon began selling a keffiyeh through Shemspeed that he coined the "Israeli keffiyeh". It featured "blue embroidered Stars of David" and the slogan "Am Israeli Chai" ("The Nation of Israel Lives") sewn into it. The design caused a small amount of controversy, because it was seen as "inappropriate for Jews to use it as a pro-Israel symbol", but Diwon explained that since there are multiple kinds of keffiyeh that are used for a number of different political symbols, he wanted it to be "just one more interpretation of a scarf worn by our brothers for thousands of years".

Artistic style

Diwon's music combines traditional Yemeni elements with modern electro hip-hop. His live sets include singers and other musicians.

Diwon described his early music as "a Jewish type of music which is either original drawing on traditional elements or new arrangements of older, traditional music." He describes his more recent music as being closer to house dancehall, hip hop and pop, and a mixture of "Arab and Middle Eastern sounds of Yemenite music with electronic dancehall tracks". He has termed his music style post-hip-hop.

Albums

Singles

Compilations

Mixtapes

As producer