Damascus — Where It All Began
I was born on July 30, 1985, in Damascus — one of the oldest cities on earth.
A city that hums. The call to prayer from a hundred minarets at dawn.
Water flowing through ancient stone courtyards. The laughter of families and the echo of civilizations that never quite left.
My father, Dr. Joseph Zeitoun, was a church historian and a cantor.
Every Sunday his voice filled the stone walls of an Orthodox church; every night, he chanted in my ear to put me to sleep.
These ancient Byzantine chants—modal and hypnotic—became the operating system of my musical mind.
“Music was never entertainment.
It was the language we used to feel things.”
The Child Who Heard Everything
At nine years old, someone handed me a cassette — Cheb Khaled’s Didi. Something clicked.
It was the collision: Western rhythm meets Eastern Arabic melody.
Music doesn’t have to choose between worlds.
It can be all worlds at once.
At eleven, I joined the scouting band at the Church of the Holy Cross.
No sheet music. Just sound. I learned call-and-response, eventually being trusted with the improvised solos.
By sixteen, I moved to the trombone;
learning to hear music from the bottom up, the foundation of a producer’s ear.
I remember climbing the sofa, then the bookshelf, just to reach the cassette deck on the high shelf.
George Zeitoun
Even then, I was climbing things to get to the music.
The Decision That Built Everything
At eighteen, I gave my father an ultimatum: I wanted to be a DJ. He refused. I left home with nothing but a dream.
It lasted three days before he called me home, saying,
“Work wherever you want.”
On March 13, 2003, I performed my first live DJ show. The journey had officially begun.
Defend your goal ferociously.
George Zeitoun
Choose your passion no matter what it costs.
Only then will you achieve what you want.
The Nomadic DJ
From that first show, I built a name across Syria. Resident DJ in nightclubs in Damascus, then Doha, then Beirut.
Sound engineer, Technical director and on-air DJ at Télé Lumière in Beirut, Sama TV and Virgin Radio in Damascus. Sound technician at Al Jazeera Children’s Channel in Qatar. Senior AV specialist for live events across the region.
Every country added something. Every console, every stage, every broadcast taught me something a classroom never could.
Feel The Groove
In December 2012, with Syria at war, I left Damascus and moved to Beirut. A city that has rebuilt itself from rubble so many times that survival is written into its nightlife. The clubs there are not entertainment venues — they are acts of defiance against history.
For seven years I worked, performed, and studied. I was learning not just how music is played, but how it is made. The producer in me was waking up.
In 2017 I released my first remix — Tamenni alek ft. Moh’d Foad.
More releases followed. Six remixes, including MinDuny — an Eminem remix that crossed 800,000 views on YouTube — Hala Bl Khamis with over 112,000 plays on SoundCloud, and El3ab Yala with 86,000.
Four original tracks: Ya Sham ft. Saher Assad, Layali, Saroukhy, and Power of Peace. All of this before I ever set foot in Montreal.
Since landing in Canada the music kept coming — Cactus in The Desert, Walaou, Wait for Her, Endless Beginning, and Soufani.
New releases are on the way.
The catalog keeps growing. So does the sound.
Montreal — Building From Zero, With My Own Hands
After Landing in Montreal in June 2019, I enrolled at Musitechnic at thirty-four years old, returning to formal education with the humility of someone who knows that passion without knowledge has a ceiling.
I studied recording, sound design, and post-production. I graduated in 2023.
But the degree was never the destination. It was the key to the next door.
With a tight budget and a clear vision, I made a decision that would define the next five to six months of my life:
I would build the studio myself, from scratch, mostly alone.
I started by teaching myself woodworking, then moved into studying acoustic treatment from the ground up. The physics, the math, and the materials. Until I could design a room that meets professional recording studio standards of +/- 3 dB.
I sourced recycled pallet wood and transformed it into walls, panels, and acoustic frames.
I painted, measured, rebuilt, and measured again until every surface served a purpose.
While Montreal celebrated the holidays, I worked longer hours than ever before.
There were no days off and no weekends — only the work, and the vision of what the room would eventually become.
Five to six months later, z-Tone Studio was real.
Not rented, not borrowed, but built by the same hands that had been shaping sound since 2003.
GAZZ — When Two Worlds Collide
One night in Montreal, I met Alex (Zaidokhi).
In 2023, GAZZ Music was born.
Fully improvised live electronic sets.
Custom synthesizer racks, drum machines, and FX units — synchronized through a laptop used strictly as a sequencer.
Downtempo, Melodic, and Minimal Techno woven with Middle Eastern and African percussive influences
No pre-recorded tracks.
Every performance has unique flow and energy.
Art Without Sharing
Is Just Noise
Twenty-two years of experience means nothing if it stays locked in one head.
Today, I mentor the next generation at z-Tone, teaching music production, DJing the way I learned: by doing.
The Reel Is Still Rolling
From Damascus to Montreal.
The reel is still rolling.
And it’s only getting better.