- The latest in Selwa Abd's colour EP series is a cosy and gently experimental bedroom techno session.
- As Bergsonist, Selwa Abd releases music as stripped-down as a tree branch in the thick of a Northeastern winter. Her style of techno reflects her love of analogue gear. "It's so simple, so physical," she told RA in 2020. "You see each sound source and you plug each one in. There's no routing, no choosing an option. It just makes sense."
Abd makes music so satisfyingly straightforward that it's easy to imagine her fiddling with hardware knobs in real time. Her latest EP is another installment of her years-long EP series titled after hexadecimal colours. #576DBD translates creamy periwinkle into minor melodies and choppy, diminutive beats.
Like most of her catalogue, the record's essence is driven by Henri-Louis Bergson's assertion that intuition is the true fuel of creativity. Intuitive noodling crafts tracks like "Endless," where Drexciyan chords give way to a torrent of heavy-handed synths which themselves eventually slip behind swarms of acid lines. The songs sound like vignettes made from longer jam sessions, cycling through patchworks of bare-bones melodies that are introduced as quickly as they vanish. Simpler ideas are put to the test on"Watching U," where a six-note melody glides up and down the scale. Abd whispers the song's title, her voice kept so small and close to the mic that it cracks into breathy spectres of the original rhythmic phrase. Later, industrial drums break the veneer of calm like the launch of fireworks in a quiet neighbourhood.
Another experiment,"Conditional," opens with bright mechanical sparkles as an erratic beat wobbles around, before finally finding its footing as sparse and swung techno. The tracks on #576DBD make for a cosy session of bedroom techno, materialising a key tenet of Detroit minimal techno pioneer Robert Hood's philosophy—"give that machine a heart."
Tracklist01. Soft Ghosting
02. Conditional
03. Watching U
04. Endless