Habibi Del Mar

Living between the
sea & the sound

Habibi Del Mar grew up in San Diego as the kid who absorbed everything. His mother played Michael Jackson, Gipsy Kings, Amr Diab, and Iranian music in the same afternoon. At school and in his headphones, it was 2Pac, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg. He started piano at nine, picked up drums at eleven, came back to jazz and pop piano at fourteen — and somewhere in there got his hands on Pro Tools and started building his own tracks. Sequencing drums, layering keyboards, chasing the deep sub-bass and hypnotic groove he heard in hip hop and couldn’t stop thinking about.

In his adolescence, he would go to Mexican block parties and quinceañeras, and cross into Tijuana, where life hit differently and the way people moved opened a new door. That curiosity carried him further south — through Mazatlán, Mexico City, Cali, Cartagena, and eventually Barranquilla, where he fell in love with the people and never really left. The years since have been a constant flow through Latin America: Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Mexico, and back again. Then around 2020, he found himself quarantined with his music equipment and deep in the catalogs of afro house — and everything clicked. The organic textures, the tribal percussion, the deep basslines. It was the same thing he’d always loved, just rooted in the earth instead of the street.

Now based between Miami, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia, Habibi Del Mar plays sets that move between two worlds: opening with deep, oceanic tracks that feel like standing at the edge of the sea — and building into something tribal, percussive, and impossible to stand still for. His productions reimagine Latin American icons like Karol G, Juan Luis Guerra, and Romeo Santos through an afro house lens. His inspiration is simple — the sea.