- Arabic-inflected jungle rhythms on SVBKVLT's landmark 50th release.
- Cairo producer ABADIR's 2021 album Pause/Stutter/Uh/Repeat took "deconstructed club" beyond the limits of the club, diving into the very nature of language and communication itself. He chopped up hours of interview recordings and warped them into glitchy beats. This time around, Mutate (his first release for Shanghai label SVBKVLT), goes in the opposite direction, harnessing footwork, jungle and reggaeton as chemical compounds for fusion with scintillating Arabic rhythms—what ABADIR has dubbed as "fatty, straight-up dance floor music."
During his time as one half of 0N4B with Mustafa Onsy, ABADIR made it clear that he was averse to going down what he deemed to be a clichéd route of East-West fusion dance music. Mutate, however, skips that categorisation and lands squarely on his most definitive sound yet: a maqsoum-junglist fusion that he stumbled upon while experimenting in a DJ set. He lauded the outcome as, "The closest to what I had always imagined to be my own club sound."
Maqsoum is a derivative form of traditional Egyptian baladi music, placing the rhythmic accent on the second beat. Ramped up to and locked in at 160 BPM, the darbuka drums sound like they're at risk of catching fire half the time. With punchy kicks, rolling snare slaps and fervent 'Hey!' chants, "Bass Belly" is a perfect no-nonsense opener.
"Bass Belly," gurgling and lurching, teases the listener with a series of false-starts that anticipate an explosion, only for the track to tuck itself away at the last moment. The frantic "Pyrolysis," on the other hand, is an unstoppable force. Breathy synths take deep inhales and exhales, only holding their breath to make way for some masterfully modulated darbuka hits. They coil up like the last rushes of water disappearing into a drain.
Sudden halts and pace-breakers are a recurring motif on Mutate. Among the unbridled chaos of the opening stretch, the desolate and ruminative "El 3ataba Interlude" appears out of nowhere as a sun-cooked moment of clarity. Warped Arabic singing, faint traffic sounds and what sounds like street festivities become mere distractions as the world appears to melt into a haze of eerie field recordings and sweeping pads. Then, as if that never happened, "Another One"—a barrage of raucous jungle breaks and impassioned chants—pulls you right back into the fray.
The ghostly field recordings on "El 3ataba Interlude" and experimentation on Pause/Stutter/Uh/Repeat proves the versatile sound engineer has a knack for absorbing and condensing his surroundings into vibrant rhythms and soundscapes. His move from Cairo to Berlin has helped bring about a seamless, idiosyncratic fusion of both worlds into something novel and captivating. Mutate is full of ferocious club sounds that use syncopation to induce palpitations—like the sampled chants on the title track command, "It's time to make the floor burn."
Tracklist01. Bass Belly
02. Pyrolysis
03. Drifting Rituals
04. Blame It On SUTRA
05. El 3ataba Interlude
06. Another One
07. Mutate
08. Irreversible
09. Ya Nasim