It is time for another MENA Local Heroes update, which means we are once again asking someone from the region to open their inner world through 15 tracks. A completely normal request, of course. Nothing intimate about it. Just please hand over your emotional archive, your sonic memories, your secret references and the songs that make you feel like you are living inside a film. Very casual.

MENA Local Heroes is STR’s monthly guest-curated playlist series, curated exclusively for Apple Music, spotlighting the people, spaces and communities shaping the region’s sound from within.

For the previous editions, we invited Honeycomb Hi-Fi, KLO, UAE athlete Noura AlKhalaf, and Made in the Emirates. And now welcome Karen Beyrouty.

Karen is a prominent Lebanese multidisciplinary artist, digital creator and community builder based in Dubai. Online, many know her as @alabeiruty — the artist who transformed her own apartment into an immersive projection-mapping installation and casually collected millions of views in the process.

She is also a freelancer, a growing content creator, a community founder, and someone with a medical background, because why have one life path when you can have several tabs open at once and all of them are emotionally demanding?

That is exactly why her MENA Local Heroes playlist feels less like a neat selection of songs and more like a personal universe. It moves through nostalgia, longing, intimacy, romance, memory, escape and that very specific feeling of missing something while you are still living it. A niche emotion, yes, but disturbingly familiar.

Naturally, we asked Karen what this playlist represents, where it should be listened to, and why music, for her, is rarely just music.

For Karen, the playlist is “a collection of emotions” she keeps coming back to — “nostalgia, longing, intimacy, movement, and that strange feeling of missing something while you are still living it.”

Her relationship with music has always been visual. She grew up playing piano and now works so much with image and space that she rarely hears a song “without imagining a scene around it”. This playlist, she says, feels less like a simple selection of tracks and more like “a series of memories and imaginary moments”.

It also reflects how she moves “between places, cultures and different versions of home”, as well as her attachment to another era. “I always joke that even though I was born in 2000, my soul somehow lived through the 90s,” she says.

Karen doesn't prescribe one specific location, which is thoughtful, because not everyone has access to a dramatic window seat at all times. For her, the state of mind matters more than the place.

“Honestly, anytime and anywhere,” she says. “I think what matters more to me is the state of mind you allow yourself to enter when you listen.”

She often uses music as a way to transport herself somewhere else — on the way to a gig, on a plane, in the car coming back home or in a cab rushing somewhere. “Letting my mind wander, especially with music in my ears, is probably one of the biggest sources of imagination and inspiration for me.”

So, yes, this is music for movement, but not necessarily fitness-tracker movement. More emotional wandering. More looking out of a cab window as though your life has just been acquired by A24.

What excites Karen most about the sound of the region today is experimentation.

“There is this freedom in the production — Arabic music can meet electronic, psychedelic, alternative, techno or completely unexpected references, and somehow still feel incredibly soulful and familiar.”

For her, Khayal by Kazdoura is a perfect example: a track that feels as though it has been brought back from another era, while the production gives that feeling “a new language”. She also mentions Aywa Aywa by Misty, where regional identity is pushed into a more electronic space.

And then, of course, there is Fairuz, who will always be a huge inspiration to her. “To me, her music almost feels like a reflection of Lebanon itself — its beauty, nostalgia, tenderness and longing,” Karen says.

That, to her, is what makes the region’s sound so interesting now: there is room for all of it. “Melancholy, nightlife, nostalgia, displacement, humour, identity, rebellion — sometimes even within the same song.”

For Karen, Wicked Game is one of the tracks that feels most personal.

“There is something incredibly simple but emotionally complicated about it,” she says. “It captures desire and distance at the same time — wanting something while already knowing it might hurt.”

But Another Day in Paradise by Phil Collins may be the most personal one. The first time she really listened to it, the environment around her almost disappeared. “It felt less like listening to an old song and more like briefly stepping into another time.”

That song helped her understand something about herself: “I can feel homesick for an era I never experienced.”

For someone hearing the playlist for the first time, Karen wants them to notice the emotion before trying to categorise the music.

“The playlist moves through different languages, eras, cultures and genres, but I think there is still one emotional thread connecting everything.”

She also wants people to notice how visual music can be. “For me, a song is rarely just a song. It can become a place, a person, a colour, a piece of architecture, a certain light, a specific night, or an entire imaginary world.”

By the end of the playlist, Karen hopes listeners understand something about her even if they know nothing else. “I would hope that they would understand that I am a dreamer,” she says. “That I am probably an old soul, that I feel things quite deeply, and that a big part of the way I understand the world is through imagination.”

More than anything, she wants people to listen without trying too hard to understand where every song belongs — and instead notice where it takes them.

Which feels like a very good instruction. Press play, stop categorising, and let the song do something inconvenient to your inner world.

Listen to MENA Local Heroes: Karen Beyrouty now on Apple Music.