Camps & Keyboards: Ratchopper Is Co-Producing Arab Pop’s Future

Apple Music is not the most user-friendly streaming platform, but it will give you a hot tip when you need one. That was my experience when I had Saint Levant’s Love Letters EP on regular rotation in my car throughout 2025. I listened to the six-track release again and again, but it took a while for its complex magic to really sink in, and only recently did I finally pay close attention to the release’s surprise sleeper hit. 

Cranking up the volume until my dashboard rattled, I would sing along to the vivid words of Palestinian defiance and joy that flow through “Daloona / دلعونة,” the dabke-indebted superjam that kicks off Love Letters. I rekindled my longtime romance with Algerian raï after falling under the spell of “Diva / بنت الذهبية,” a luminous slab of Wahrani Vice raï-funk featuring a swooning keyboard solo that could have come straight off a late-’80s Cheb Hasni cassette. And sure, every once in a while, I would pay a visit to “Kalamantina / كلمنتينا,” a lighthearted tune that crosses an Egyptian maqsoom beat with an iconic Roberta Flack lyric. In a team-up with Egyptian trap star Marwan Moussa, Saint Levant leverages his staccato phrasings to maximum silkiness as he dishes on the torment of love at first sight. 

When I first pulled up Love Letters on my Apple Music app, I looked over the tracklist and noticed a tiny gray dot affixed to “Kalamantina” – indicating that a high proportion of fellow Apple Music users considered this track a personal favorite. I found the dot surprising, considering that other tracks on the album (like “Daloona” and “Exile”) covered topics that could disturbingly be considered more timely or relevant during the devastation of Gaza and the Palestinian genocide. I listened to “Daloona” over and over, and I assumed that millions of other listeners loved that track as much as I did, but “Daloona” wasn’t even worthy of a gray dot. Meanwhile in recent months, “Kalamantina” has achieved something of a ubiquitous status across the region, especially on social media as it has inspired endless videos on Instagram and TikTok. The YouTube post for the song has racked up more than 60 million views since being posted in February, even though the post is just the song with a static image of the Love Letters cover without an actual music video. 

It turns out that while the people liked “Daloona,” they really loved “Kalamantina.” To unpack this some more, I recently got on a WhatsApp call with Souhail Guesmi, aka Ratchopper, who composed and produced “Kalamantina,” “Daloona,” and “Diva” along with two other songs on Love Letters. (He also composed and produced two additional tracks released as part of the deluxe version of Love Letters, which dropped in August.)

A 33-year-old keyboardist, songwriter, producer, and mixer, Guesmi grew up in Jendouba, a town in a rural part of northwestern Tunisia close to the Algerian border. Classically trained on piano, he first started making beats as a teenager using a cracked version of FruityLoops. He now operates his own label, [BLOC] C, and has released multiple albums and EPs of solo material in between collaborating with rising stars from across the region. 

Ratchopper’s list of track and album credits runs deep, with Saint Levant, Lella Fadda, and Zeyne among his most recent creative partners. He’s spent the bulk of 2025 recording, touring, and traveling, but during a two-week break back home in Tunis he also found the time to put together a solo EP, B.T.S / عِتِّيدك, which he released last month exclusively on his website.

Stylish, savvy, and well versed in a range of canonical music styles, he’s a rare artist who I would not hesitate to call a musical genius. We talked while he was in Doha, Qatar, finishing out sessions for Saint Levant’s next album. On our phone conversation and in subsequent chats, we discussed his work with Saint Levant and other collaborators as well as his abiding love for Ziad Rahbani. He also offered plenty of details about his creative process, his thoughts on genre, and his recommendations for the best workstation/arranger keyboards. Our conversation below was lightly edited for length and clarity. 

How has your year been? Looks like you’ve been busy. 

I mean, it’s been exhausting, but really also exciting. It’s been a very interesting journey, and it’s interesting how it’s growing also. 

Do you notice audiences getting bigger at the shows you’ve been playing with Saint Levant? 

Yeah, they’re really getting monumentally bigger. “Kalamantina” was the song that had the biggest cultural impact. I think that changed everything. 

All of the songs from Love Letters have gotten a lot of attention, but “Kalamantina” has turned into a sleeper hit, going viral on social media and reaching Number One on the Billboard’s Levantine Top 50 charts. Do you have an idea why that song in particular took off?

I don’t know. Just numbers-wise, that’s the case. It was a different, old new sound. Playful. It’s a multitude of reasons, factors – nobody can really know what. But you can just speculate and try to analyze. It grew slowly, slowly, and then boom. There was no music video, it wasn’t really pushed much compared to the other tracks on the Love Letters EP. But somehow it just kept growing in TikTok, and then it became a cultural impact. The other day, I was in Tunis in a grocery store, and they had a food product that they called kalamantina – like a mix of oranges and nuts. Here you have these events. They call them “kalamantina nights.” It really became a cultural thing. Everyone knows what it is.

“It was a different, old new sound. Playful. It’s a multitude of reasons, factors – nobody can really know what. But you can just speculate and try to analyze.”

I mean, it’s a beautiful song. 

“Kalamantina” was the easiest one [to write], the fastest also. We did it in maybe one hour. It started as almost a joke, like a fun thing: “Oh, let’s try this.” He started writing in a playful way, and it was the least serious song on the whole EP, you know? Because the other stuff is, you know, deep, substantive, lyrical, emotional. This was the least serious, but then it took over everything and became the biggest. It kind of shows that you don’t need to always be serious.

Even for someone like Saint Laurent, he’s obviously carrying the Palestinian case on his shoulders. But then you see all the reactions and “Kalamantina” being sung by kids in Gaza. Even though it had nothing to do with direct lyrics about Palestine, it was adopted massively. We have videos of children in Gaza singing under the rubble. It’s crazy, man. In weddings everywhere around the Arab world. The cultural impact, it’s hard for me to fathom. 

The other songs on the EP have a clearer dabke or raï influence. And “Kalamantina” I feel like has less of that. 

It’s more of a Shami/Egyptian drum pattern, based on maqsoom with some variations. And light, very minimal production. I think the color was maybe missing in the scene: Playful, a bit warm, a bit nostalgic.

How did you meet Saint Levant? 

Well, it started in 2023. His manager, Marek [Razzouk], was a fan of an artist I worked with whose name is Koast, a Tunisian artist. She was the first one signed on my label, the first artist we launched back in 2019. Marek was a big fan of Koast, and then he was listening and wondering who’s producing, who’s doing all this. He reached out at some point to a girl we know who was, at the time, the manager of Koast, working with us, and he said if I’m available to join a camp in Limoux in the south of France. They sent an invitation, and I went, and that’s when we met. 

There were a bunch of other producers that were invited, and at the time they were working on what later became the Deira album. It’s actually then when I did “Diva,” which ended up being on Love Letters. So I did a bunch of songs then. At that point Marwan had several producers, and then he kind of wanted to explore me more. I did co-production for the song with TIF on Deira, “Forgive Me,” and then it kind of started from there. We did a camp in Egypt, and literally since then we’ve been just doing camps all the time. Like, almost every month, every two months, we’re in a camp somewhere.

How does it work? Do you just meet up somewhere and then set up a mobile studio?

Yes, he just shows up. Sometimes with a very limited team. Sometimes we invite other songwriters. We get an Airbnb and we set up. I bring my laptop speakers, mic, and we just start making songs. And then slowly, things will start to reveal themselves. Like, “Oh, this sounds like it could be something. Oh, we like this new pocket that we’re kind of unlocking now. It’s inspiring. Let’s put these together.” 

Cool. 

Just meet, make music. Sometimes it’s intentional, sometimes not.

So what can you tell me about “Daloona,” the first track off of Love Letters? I’ve been listening to that song nonstop all year. 

It was the first song we did in the Egypt camp, in like July 2024. We were in Sahel and “Daloona” was literally the first track we did. What kind of inspired it were the drums. When I arrived there, they had rented a nice Yamaha Motif keyboard. It was my first time touching one, so I started listening to what presets it had. I just clicked the play button and started playing this nice loop. And that inspired everyone around and we started building on that. 

For the instrumental synth solo [that starts after the chorus], it was also very improvised. Before going to that camp, I gathered some synth sounds that are used in weddings and on keyboards that they have – sounds I’ve collected for years, but it was one of my freshest collections. I started to play with those sounds, and that solo came out instantly. To me, it wasn’t even going to be the official solo, but as we kept hearing it more and more, and everyone was liking it, it kind of grew on me, and I was convinced: “Okay, let’s just keep it.” 

There are so many layers to that song. The phrase ‘ala dal‘aoona comes from a Levantine folk song. Some of the lyrics are adapted from a Palestinian resistance song, and the production has elements of dabke and hip-hop.

Yeah, it’s a bit festive also. One of the points of the song is to embrace celebrating as a Palestinian. It’s not always about being serious. It’s also about still celebrating and being happy and dancing, and that’s part of the resistance. It’s like, we’re still here. We’re dancing. We’re alive. We’re good. [After we made it,] Marwan decided it would be a great idea to involve some legendary Palestinian artists. He invited Shadi Al Borini and Qassem Najjar, underground legends who sing in weddings. 

You have 47 Soul in there too. 

There were several Palestinians gathering around this. It’s very cool. 

What did you like about using the Motif keyboard? 

Usually in my production, there are certain types of sounds I always end up choosing or leaning towards. It’s more like the ’90s, let’s say early 2000s type of sounds, whether it’s synths or guitars or even percussion-wise and drums. I’m always leaning towards an organic sound that’s a mix between an actual live sound but with some grit or electronic touch. I don’t prefer straight-up plugin sounds, or very sterile sounds. I hate clap sounds. [laughs] I’m not sure you can find anything [I made] recently that uses a clap sound, or like a basic 808 hi-hat. 

For the Yamaha, it gives me that power to have those sounds at the tip of my fingers – boom, boom, straight away. Go to category, pull up a bass sound, and it’s exactly what I’m imagining. So even though I only used that keyboard for maybe 10 days in my life, it still strikes me how much you could pull off with it. How much it inspires.

“This was the least serious (track), but then it took over everything and became the biggest. It kind of shows that you don’t need to always be serious.”

When I listen to all the classic raï from the ’80s and ’90s, one thing I have always wondered is what kind of drum machines they were using, what keyboards they were using. Same with ’90s Egyptian pop. I’m always like, “Damn, what are they using?” In the course of writing and producing music that borrows from raï and other Arabic pop styles, have you ever learned how all that magic happened? 

I mean, I watch a lot and analyze a lot. Also, I’m in touch with a lot of raï bands in the region, and I know what keyboards they use. And the good thing is, they’re putting out the sounds, so you can get them. I have a good, substantial collection of those sounds from over the years.

Do you mean like sample packs of drum loops and keyboard sounds? 

They are making those loops and they are using them and sharing them with each other, and that’s how it grows. They’re designing the sounds, and then they’re making the loops – either recording them or programming them using those keyboards – and they share them as a set. It’s a file you download and install in the keyboards. And then, boom, you’d have those loops, that style, the bass line.

And on the other hand, you’d have the synth sounds to do the solos with. At first, they just used the sounds that existed already in those keyboards – something like the Korg Pa800. They started by using the sounds that came with workstation/arranger keyboards that were being released in the ’70s and ’80s. But then they started developing those sounds and programming. It became a huge thing. 

Those workstation keyboards are the big ones, right? 

Yeah, exactly. Workstation keyboards are crazy. They’re called workstation/arranger keyboards, because it’s a whole arrangement you’re doing on the fly. You press play, it plays the loops, and the keyboard is split in half—the right half would have a synth sound to play the solos, and the left half you’re playing the chords. When you play the chords, you press on the keys, and the whole harmony is changing. There would be a bass line playing over those chords, there would be a clav playing plucks on those chords. You’re making a whole song on the fly with just one keyboard.

In the United States and Europe, those workstation keyboards aren’t super popular with electronic producers. But they seem huge across like the Middle East and North Africa. 

They’re the shit! They’re everything. Everything revolves around those. That’s my next thing, actually. My next thing is to buy one of those. Because I’m tired of plugins, honestly. For these specific styles, it makes a huge difference. 

One of your first breakout collaborations was with Ghali, the Italian rapper whose parents are Tunisian. What was it like working with him? You did recording camps together right, how did those collaborations come together?

I met Ghali in Tunis, he came to my studio where we started playing each other music we were working on at the time. He later invited me for writing camps in Italy and more recently to perform with him at the Sanremo festival.

Ghali is a visionary artist and I enjoyed working with him a lot and would of course love to do so again, but I would say that it was a learning curve for me. During those camps it was challenging for me due to the italian language barrier with his team. Since then, I think it’s something important that I’ve observed as a challenge for many arab artists working in the west for example, where it’s crucial that the parties involved are able to bounce ideas and communicate in a common language.

Music and the process of creating it involves a lot of emotions, that everyone from the producer and engineer to the songwriters need to be able to understand and relate to between each other to build something off of. Despite this, I think it’s something that gets easier with experience, and something I’m open to.

You produced Lella Fadda’s debut track from 2020, الوقت مش بيعدي, and collaborated with her on other projects too. How would you approach an artist like her with a bit of a different style or sound from someone like Ghali or Saint Levant?

The approach can vary a lot from one artist to another depending on their style and audience, where they are in their career and what they are trying to do, but the process is always still more or less the same. I usually like to get to know the artist a bit beforehand, get a feel of their artistic philosophy, mentality, a little bit of their personality. It helps a lot with making music that’s close to them and reflects their vision or the emotions they are trying to convey, which doesn’t require a different approach per se.

I have a home studio in Tunis which usually makes the vibes chill and more natural to begin with, where I recently did a writing camp with Lella to work on new stuff for example, and I brought many other artists like Marwan and from my own label BLOC C.

I wanted to ask you about Zeyne’s new album, AWDA. I’ve been listening to a lot of like Sade lately, and AWDA sounds to me kind of like Palestinian/Jordanian Sade. What was your role in that album? 

I produced or co-produced four tracks, and I mastered it. Mastered, kind of pre mixed, a lot of stuff. Vocal production. There was a lot of involvement. I came later on, at a later stage. I was in Amman working on a camp with Marwan, and then I wanted to stay more to explore the country a bit. I had my friend Nasir [AlBashir], who is the executive producer on the album. He invited me to stay with him for some time, and then we started doing sessions with Zeyne, and they were, I don’t know, 70 percent done with the album. We did some sessions and then later on, they decided to involve me more and more. It started from producing one song and then doing co-production on other songs. It grew slowly. 

I feel like I haven’t heard anything like this before.

Yeah, exactly. It’s in its own league, and it’s really exciting to be part of it. It opens up a new pocket in the scene. 

What do you think of terms like Arabizi and A-pop to describe artists like Saint Levant and Zeyne?

I honestly never heard of the term Arabizi before until you asked now. But I was never a fan of names like A-Pop also because I think they are a bit reductive. It’s like saying “E-Pop”, to describe all pop that comes from Europe like Flamenco, Swedish House, etc., which becomes a term so broad that it makes it meaningless.

With K-pop for example, the term points to one genre of popular music of South Korea, one country that has relatively a homogenous culture and language, and a centralized music industry structure. I understand the need to expand and create new names and genres as music develops rapidly, but to me maybe this regional- or language-focused definition feels reductive when even the region in question spans continents with different cultures, ethnicities and dialects of a language that aren’t even mutually intelligible.

What’s the story behind your new EP, B.T.S / عِتّيدك? It’s your first solo release in five years, you released it exclusively on your website, and it’s only 5 minutes long!

Well, it actually came in a moment where I got maybe one to two weeks to myself. Which was very recent, like end of September. I was sitting with a piano at home, and I just felt inspired. And because all those years [I’ve been working], there are a lot of ideas of course that are growing in me – inspiration, learning new stuff, working on all kinds of projects. But I never got the time to do anything with it. So it kind of came instantly. I don’t even know how. There was not much thinking, no planning, no anything. I just sat with the piano and started playing. Everything came about, it was recorded very candidly. A very spontaneous project, you know?

“You can have a crazy harmonic context but keep the vocal lines very minimal, contained, not crazy runs, so that everyone can sing too. And at the same time it’s emotional.”

When you first sent it to me, I was like, “Oh, it’s over. That was fast.” 

[laughs] It’s kind of symbolic of how much time I got to myself to do something. It ended up being five minutes. But like, five condensed minutes. There’s a lot in every track. It kind of sums up my palette, let’s say. 

I feel like there was a strong presence of Ziad Rahbani on the EP. 

Of course, Ziad is one of my biggest influences. 

As a fellow keyboardist and pianist, how do you feel about his work and his legacy?

I mean, his legacy will stay for forever. My mom played a lot of Fairuz growing up and she sang along. And I kind of noticed that most of the Fairuz songs that I liked were the ones written by Ziad, composed, arranged by Ziad. And then I discovered that he has his own works outside of Fairuz and then I fell in love with those. I listened to them over and over, forever. It grew a lot in me, and I kind of have a Ziad seed in me. 

I can definitely hear his influence in your music. He took a whole range of sounds and styles and put them together into something very real, honest, and unique, that really resonated with people. He adapted a Brazilian jazz fusion sound on albums like Houdou Nisbi, but then he also has the album Bil Afrah of traditional takht performances. And he does it perfectly in both cases. 

This Ziad stuff, even from Fairuz, it’s extremely sophisticated. His songs are jazzy, but they grew to be culturally impactful, and everyone sings them. Everyone knows them. That’s the genius part of it – the arrangement, playing with subtleties. You can have a crazy harmonic context but keep the vocal lines very minimal, contained, not crazy runs, so that everyone can sing too. And at the same time it’s emotional. 

What were you doing when you heard that he had died? 

I was in Beirut when he died. 

Oh, no way. 

That was one of the saddest moments. When I was going to Beirut, it was in my mind a lot, like, ‘Damn, I wish one day I could meet Ziad, and I’m in Beirut now.’ And then, boom, I was hiking in the mountains and heard the news, and I couldn’t even go to the funeral. After I went back to Tunis and had this time to myself and started improvising, making this EP, it kind of made sense that some or a lot of Ziad’s inspiration came into it. It was right after, almost kind of a homage even.

What’s next for you? Are you going take any time off or go on vacation?

Well, I hope so. I’m looking forward to going to Sweden, end of December, for maybe Christmas with my girlfriend’s family. I hope I get a visa. [laughs] 

It’s wild to be a successful record producer, and then at the same time have to deal with waiting for visa applications.

That’s really been my life. Literally. That’s my life. Always waiting for a visa.