A Conversation with Yasmin Kuymizakis: Why She's Trading Electronic Pop for Maltese Roots
When Yasmin Kuymizakis steps onto a stage, audiences know exactly what to expect. As Joon, she commands dancefloors with electro-pop energy—synthesizers, rhythmic precision, the kind of production that travels well on festival circuits. But walk into a dimly lit venue in Valletta in 2026 and you might encounter something altogether different: a woman inhabiting the persona Ġiżimina, performing Maltese-language compositions layered over cassette-tape fragments of 1980s guitar music, asking questions about identity, gender, and what it means to hold onto memory in a place that's changing rapidly.
The shift isn't accidental. It's deliberate, layered, and rooted in something more personal than reinvention usually allows.
Why This Matters
• Language as belonging: For residents seeking Maltese-language music that doesn't sacrifice artistic ambition, this project arrives as genuine cultural contribution—not tourism, not nostalgia, but active engagement with living heritage.
• A blueprint for younger artists: When Ġiżimina's approach gains traction, it signals that there's room in Malta's music ecosystem for work that prioritizes local language and archival exploration over streaming algorithms and radio-friendly formats.
• Gender, tradition, and reclamation: By channeling a female artistic identity through historically male-dominated folk spaces, Kuymizakis quietly challenges who gets to be the keeper of cultural memory on this island.
The Album That Started With a Filmmaker
The origin story begins in 2025, when Kuymizakis connected with Vincent Moon, a filmmaker and sound archivist whose reputation centers on excavating overlooked audio from around the world. Moon invited her to collaborate on a live performance, and something clicked. Rather than treat it as a one-off appearance, Kuymizakis began investigating the archival materials Moon had gathered—specifically, cassette recordings of traditional Maltese għana and guitar sessions documented between 1980 and 1990, much of it captured in the bars and social clubs where these musicians actually lived and performed.
What emerged was the seven-track album "Id-Dlam Id-Dawl"—Maltese for The Darkness The Light—released under the Ġiżimina identity. The album doesn't sample these recordings in the conventional sense. Instead, it uses them as scaffolding, building electronic textures and contemporary production around fragments of guitar and voice, creating a conversation between decades rather than a simple mashup.
"It's a sense of belonging," Kuymizakis has said of the project, describing what drew her to write in Maltese and adopt this separate artistic entity. For someone who spent years crafting an international profile as Joon, the deliberate inward turn feels significant—not a retreat, but a recalibration of what her art is for and who it speaks to.
The Sound: Analog Memory Meets Digital Now
The production choices here are worth lingering on. Each track weaves those 1980s and 1990s guitar fragments—cassette hiss included—into layered electronic frameworks. The technical effect mirrors the conceptual one: darkness and light coexist, neither erasing the other. The old recordings aren't cleaned up and archived; they're left raw, brought forward, allowed to breathe alongside synthesized textures that feel contemporary without feeling cold.
For listeners accustomed to Joon's direct, danceable approach, Ġiżimina demands patience. The album is quieter, more introspective. It's the sound of someone who has spent time in archives, who has listened to these cassettes repeatedly, who understands that cultural memory isn't a museum display but something living that can be rearranged without being disrespected.
Thematically, the album engages with change, loss, uncertainty, and renewal—the emotional coordinates of a small island nation in flux. But it also addresses more immediate concerns: gender expression, environmental pressure, the tension between public and private life in a place where social visibility comes with scrutiny.
What This Means for Malta's Music Scene
The Arts Council Malta has noted this project as part of a broader encouraging trend—younger artists engaging seriously with traditional forms, not as heritage conservation but as living material. When institutions recognize that blending folk traditions with electronic soundscapes can attract audiences who might otherwise ignore Maltese music altogether, they've essentially given permission for a new creative category to exist.
For Maltese residents, the album addresses a quiet frustration: much of the island's contemporary music scene faces outward, chasing international audiences and streaming metrics. Work in Maltese remains less common, particularly when it aspires to artistic sophistication rather than entertainment. Kuymizakis, with her international credentials and production skills, choosing to work in Maltese sends a signal that the language itself—and the cultural specificity it carries—is worth centering.
For expats and newcomers to Malta, the album provides a portal. You don't need to understand għana conventions or have deep historical knowledge to feel the weight of these recordings. The electronic production makes the work accessible; the archival elements offer texture and authenticity.
Gender and Tradition: Why the Separate Persona Matters
The choice to inhabit Ġiżimina as a distinct persona isn't theatrical excess. It's a conscious framework for exploring how gender intersects with Maltese folk music—a tradition historically dominated by men performing in public spaces, often to other men. By reinterpreting these recordings through a female artistic identity and within an electronic context, Kuymizakis challenges assumptions about who gets to be the custodian of cultural memory and how that memory can be shaped.
This echoes broader conversations happening in contemporary music globally. When artists from Iceland to Eastern Europe return to regional archives, they're asking similar questions: Whose voice is preserved? Whose story gets told? How does cultural revival avoid simply replicating the power structures embedded in the original material?
In Malta's compact social landscape, where public visibility carries different weight than in larger cities, this move registers as particularly intentional.
The Festival Connection: How Ritmu and Community Shaped This Work
Kuymizakis' involvement with Ritmu, the annual festival celebrating Maltese folk traditions and għana, fed directly into this project. The festival's emphasis on oral tradition, intergenerational learning, and live performance shaped how she approached the archival recordings—not as historical documents to be reverently preserved, but as raw material with creative potential.
Her participation in "Sustain-Delay," an experimental event series pairing electronic sounds with archival content to explore memory and temporality, further signals an artist deliberately seeking out spaces where past and present aren't cleanly separated. These aren't side projects; they're extensions of the same inquiry.
The Arc: From Yews to Joon to Ġiżimina
Understanding this album requires zooming out and recognizing Kuymizakis' pattern of reinvention. She emerged as Yews, then shifted dramatically toward the "more direct, fun and dancey" sound that became Joon—a pivot that landed her on the US indie label Italians Do It Better and opened international doors. That was an outward-facing move, a calculated step toward broader audiences and festival lineups abroad.
The Ġiżimina project reverses the vector. It's inward, rooted, linguistic, and uninterested in international optimization. For an artist with her track record, that's not a compromise; it's a luxury—the ability to pursue something because it matters personally rather than because it serves career momentum.
The Larger Story: What Comes Next
Whether "Id-Dlam Id-Dawl" sparks a broader movement among Malta-based artists toward local-language production and archival engagement remains an open question. English remains the commercial default in the island's music industry; most artists with ambitions beyond local performance shift naturally toward the global language.
But Kuymizakis has created a working model for how heritage and electronics can coexist without either one diminishing the other. She's demonstrated that Maltese-language work can meet contemporary production standards and artistic ambition. She's shown that cultural specificity and artistic credibility aren't contradictory.
The album ultimately suggests something quiet but important: that Malta's musical identity isn't fixed, archived, or relegated to institutional preservation efforts. It's still being actively written by artists willing to spend time with cassette tapes, to honor tradition without fetishizing it, and to ask what belonging actually means when you're creating in your own language for your own people.
