FR 122: Broken Frames and Porous Borders
Outernational sounds from Nadah El Shazly, Civilistjävel! x Mayssa Jallad, Mark Ernestus, and more
Today’s issue is unusually and unexpectedly international. I hadn’t planned it this way, but I ended up writing about records from all over the damn place. Basic Channel’s Mark Ernestus and the players in Ndagga Rhythm Force recently returned with a head-spinning new album that turns the group’s Senegalese rhythms inside out. In another cross-border collab, Swedish dub-techno specialist Civilistjävel! put his ethereal stamp on Lebanon’s Mayssa Jallad, remixing her 2023 album Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels. From Egypt, Abdullah Miniawy teams up with a pair of trombonists and delivers one of the most strikingly original records I’ve heard recently; also from Egypt, Montreal-based Nadah El Shazly and her Cairo co-producer 3Phaz offer a seductive album of psychedelic trip-hop. Spin the globe and land on Bogotá, where Seph signs his name to the final release on Insurgentes, parent label to Colombia’s TraTraTrax, closing out the imprint in fine style.
All that, plus new records from John Roberts, Gyrofield, Simo Cell, and more. Scroll on for all the music, and stay tuned: In the next couple of weeks I’ve got two heavy-hitter interviews coming up, plus the best music of 2025 so far…
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Record of the Week
Civilistjävel! x Mayssa Jallad: The Battle of the Hotels (Versions) (Six of Swords)
Beirut musician Mayssa Jallad’s 2023 album Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels (FR44) was almost too topical for comfort: It was based on a period of urban warfare that ignited across Beirut’s high-rise hotel district in 1975, early in Lebanon’s civl war, with magic-realist lyrics often sung from the perspective of the hotels themselves (“Blue hides in my body/Plays music on the instruments, drinks wine/Standing in the elevator, leaning against missiles/And the restaurant spins while the sniping goes on”). Though the album’s titular conflict happened half a century ago, it’s hard to hear today without considering Lebanon’s ongoing political crises—or, for that matter, the death and destruction meted out by Israel as it flattens building after building in Gaza (and now Iran).
The album’s gorgeously sepulchral ambient songwriting suggested a Middle Eastern answer to Lucrecia Dalt, Grouper, or Mabe Fratti; now Swedish dub-techno producer Civilistjävel! (Tomas Bodén) has spun Jallad’s airy guitars, synths, and vocals into even more ethereal shapes on a six-song remix LP. Subtraction is the watchword: On the opening “Etel, Kharita (Version)” he combines and condenses elements from two of Jallad’s originals, letting her voice spread out like ink drops in water. “Holiday Inn (March 21 to 29) (Version)” takes Jallad’s most expansive piece—thrumming drum beats, chaotic swirls of voice—and distills it to a dub framework that makes Rhythm & Sound’s productions look almost cluttered in comparison. Some tracks bear little obvious relation to their source material, like “Mudun (Dub),” a downy tuft of forlorn chords; in “Holiday Inn (January to March) (Version),” on the other hand, Bodén uses an understated pulse to fundamentally reroute the energy of Jallad’s music, turning an acoustic ballad into coiled techno. He ends with the most quietly intense remix of the set, channeling the gothic drone of “Kharita”—which, in the original version, might as well be a Lebanese This Mortal Coil—into a freight-train chug fueled by whispers and sighs. It’s the most remarkable piece of dub techno I’ve heard this year.
Albums
Seph: Fiera (Insurgentes)
Before TraTraTrax—the Bogotá label that has emerged as a crucial hub for Latin American electronic music over the past five years—there was Insurgentes. Insurgentes got its start in 2017 with the militant techno of Verraco’s Resistir EP, and over the past eight years, it’s built out a catalog of club music that’s both stern and ecstatic. Now the TraTraTrax junta is shutting down its former parent label. The final transmission comes from Argentina’s Seph, who previously released two EPs on the label (as well as last year’s Séptimo Sentido LP for Lapsus). I think of Seph as something like the Skee Mask of the Southern Cone (appropriately, perhaps, given Insurgentes’ name and balaclava-adjacent sleeve designs), sculpting high-def sound design around shuddering machine rhythms, with the occasional foray into IDM. Fiera, his most fully realized work yet, unites the two tendencies. The rhythms are tough and propulsive, but his synths have the iridescent quality I associate with Move D and Benjamin Brunn’s work together. Following the ambient intro of “Ígnea SPX21,” “Ascent” offers a flyover of Barker territory, dub chords rolling over puddle-splash hi-hats, before “Cybervena” launches into a high-speed Detroit techno epic and “Renew” tears into shuddering, almost industrial-strength drums. The whole album is a killer fusion of heavyweight drums and psychedelic synth textures, and goes out on a high with “Anti-Debug,” gnarled bass wrapped around spiky percussion like a tree that has gradually swallowed up metal hardware affixed to its trunk.
Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force: Khadim (Ndagga)
Mark Ernestus’ career is a pendulum swinging between varying densities of sound: from the granite surface of Basic Channel’s “Enforcement” to the talcum clouds of “Radiance,” say. After Rhythm & Sound’s constellations of dub hits and empty space, he toughed up again as he began delving into Senegalese music, first with the busy percussive onslaught of Jeri-Jeri and then his Ndagga Rhythm Force group, built around what Andy Beta once described as “the rolling thunder of polyrhythms… [that] can be heard from 15 kilometers away.” But where Ndagga’s 2016 album Yermande sometimes felt like an impermeable wall of drums, its surface smoothed by Ernestus mixing, their new album, Khadim, makes Swiss cheese out of all that stucco. Recorded with a stripped-down crew after years on the road, Khadim jettisons the guitars and many of the drums, leaving just one or two percussionists and singer Mbene Diatta Seck to float in Ernestus’ Prophet-5 and dubwise effects. It’s impossibly lush and rich—rhythmically liquid and seemingly unbound by gravity, with unfathomable levels of detail presenting themselves as you dive into the mix. Listening feels like levitating.
Nadah El Shazly: Laina Tani (One Little Independent)
Nadah El Shazly’s Laina Tani is an album of big emotions—vocals straining against electronic processing, concussive drum beats bleeding into the red—but it’s the quiet moments in the margins that grab me most, like a quizzical little bleep refrain in “Banit,” with its dubbed-out resemblance to Massive Attack’s “Three.” Echoes of ANOHNI, Arca, and El Shazly’s One Little Independent label-mate Björk can all be heart rippling through the Egyptian-born, Montreal-based musician’s second album—particularly the Björk of Homogenic, given Laina Tani’s distinctive blend of distorted electronic percussion (the signature, I’m assuming of co-producer 3Phaz) and acoustic instruments like Sarah Pagé’s harp, which she tunes to Arabic scales. Even without knowing what the songs’ lyrics are about, I’m captivated by El Shazly’s voice—behold it twirling with knife-like grace on “Kaabi Aali,” or hissing like steam on the noirish “Eid”—which provides the focal point in these dimly lit fusions of experimental sound design and contemporary trip-hop.
Abdullah Miniawy: Peacock dreams أَحْلَامُ الطَّاوُوسِ (PFL Songs)
I’ve never heard anything quite like this record from Egyptian composer and singer Abdullah Miniawy, whose name you might recall from a series of collaborations with the German group Carl Gari on The Trilogy Tapes and AD 93. It’s a trio record, essentially, for voice and two trombones, played by Robinson Khoury and Jules Boittin. (I might credit reverb—or even just space—as the fourth player here.) Again, I have no idea what the content of these songs is, though I love the Walter Benjamin-like elegance of the artist’s formulation for the album: “A peacock dreams of being a poet,” he writes. “It ponders, trying to shed its colors, turning its feathers into a gradient of flesh. On the other side, a poet longs for the peacock’s colors; a galactic blend of earth, forest, sea and sky, as seen from a vantage point. The poet can close their eyes and absorb the knowledge of the finite. Yet, trapped in a monotone concentration, eyebrows plucked down to 111, they miss much. The peacock, dipping deep into the ink of the poet’s pen, sails through a tube into the poet’s body. A fluttering storm erupts, reversing the roles: the peacock finds itself under arrest warrant While the poet, his utterance collapsing into a cry; haunting, like a peacock's wail struggles to describe the world.”
It really does remind me of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” essay, right down to that “fluttering storm.” Perhaps Miniawy is the Angel of History, howevering over the wreckage, borne ceaselessly into the future, the pile of debris growing skyward. Whatever it may really be about, it’s gripping listening, Miniawy’s bold and fragile cry pinned between those two trombones, the mood by turns elegiac, harried, and beatific.
John Roberts: Regarding Film (Brunette Editions)
John Roberts’ latest album began with the idea of the “pillow shot”—static images, unrelated to the narrative or action, that don’t so much set the scene as deepen the mood, as well as drawing the visual rhythm, pausing for breath and slowing the pace before the next scene. Sonically, it reminds me of MK Velsorf and Aase Nielsen’s recent approximation of Satie’s furniture music for Laurel Halo’s AWE label (FR102), but where their album was recorded live, Roberts’ is a meticulous studio creation. He began by composing a set of leitmotifs in his Renoise sequencer; studio musicians from Berlin’s Emil Berliner studios—home to many film soundtracks—then recorded his parts individually, with no knowledge of what the rest of the score sounded like. Finally, Roberts reworked their individual recordings into a kind of chamber-ambient collage form that, crucially, maintained the illusion of live playing, papering over any obvious seams. You might not guess any of that from simply listening to it, but the cinematic stillness of his pieces—piano, strings, saxophone all twisting like elements of a Calder mobile in late-afternoon light—is deeply expressive. (Fans of the Apricot Ensemble, Lemon Quartet, G.S. Schray, K. Freund, et al., will lap this up.) Roberts says that his goal is to continue building on this model and, as he develops his chops, create more elaborate “semi-fictional worlds.” I can’t wait to see where he goes from here; the closing “Pillow Shot,” a nine-minute ambient etude accompanied by the slow-motion patter of an overhead fireworks display, feels like an entire film playing out across closed lids.
EPs
Gyrofield: Suspension of Belief EP (Kapsela)
Until recently I’d thought of Gyrofield primarily as a junglist—just witness the thrillingly contorted breakbeat mutations of last year’s These Heavens EP for XL, or the even more experimental slant of the Hong Kong-born producer’s Flower Burial, also from last year. Her Akin / Mother double-A-side for Fabriclive earlier this year also slotted comfortably within 160 terrain (even if the skulking “Akin” also demonstrated her disinclination to play to convention). But on her new EP for Objekt’s Kapsela label, the 22-year-old Kiana Li takes a strikingly different path. Riding a tightly coiled, coolly relentless 4/4 beat, and slashed with angular streaks of synth, “Vegetation Grows Thick” is techno, essentially—lush and dangerous, with an air of mystery that reminds me of Baby Ford and Eon’s “Dead Eye.” “Bolete” is techno too, more or less—at least, that’s what the hi-hats say, though the lurching beat and martial snare tattoos might have other ideas. (The atmospheric squiggles of synth, meanwhile, are pure psychedelia, no matter where you file the track.) Things get weirder on the B-side: “Rorschach” is a broken techno bruiser infused with the kind of dubbed-out spoken-word that could crack minds open in certain contexts, and all bets are off on “Brinjal,” an exorcism set to tumbledown percussive samples and scraps of free-jazz saxophone. Taken together, it’s the most thrilling “dance” record I’ve heard this month.
Adam Feingold: Nothing Is a Field (Temple)
The last thing I heard from Montreal’s Adam Feingold—fka Ex-Terrestrial—was an entrancing EP of ambient-leaning dub techno under his Pondlicker alias for Naff, the label he runs with Priori (FR92), that would appeal to anyone who has fallen under Purelink’s spell. Now he’s back under his own name with something equally spacious but a little tougher. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The minimal revival is picking up steam. (Now if only we can keep the corny people away this time.) All four tracks here are low slung and tripped out, with trim machine grooves caught up in a smeary haze of Windex synths. “Spiral Kiss, Labyrinth Mist” is the dreamiest of the four cuts, dripping with rosy pads; it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine it on Smallville. “Cusp of Spring” slides into more damaged territory, rhythms crumbling like soft earth beneath gauzy pads and a pensive vocal sample—file alongside Dettinger’s Intershop or James Devane’s Beauty Is Useless (FR74), perhaps. The two A-side tracks are primed for clubbier contexts, arraying twinkly little accents like so many streamers around terse, punchy, Perlonesque drum grooves. What really makes them pop is the way they evolve—particularly “Ten Yr Loop,” which over the course of its seven-minute run blossoms into fluttering strings worthy of Pépé Bradock. Gorgeous.
Simo Cell: FL Louis (TEMET)
Here’s a revival I didn’t expect: a full-scale exhumation of classic French house in the mold of early(ish) Daft Punk and Mr. Oizo. The homage is so faithful that at first I wondered if the gravelly vocoder of “Rushin’” was sampled directly from “Technologic.” But faithful doesn’t mean safe, though: The French producer infuses these four cuts with all the rhythmic invention and rude energy that he’s always brought to his music, while the cut-up vowel treatments are so unhinged they might as well be Errorsmith or MMM outtakes. He tries out four distinct vibes, from the half-speed mosh energy of “Oh No!” to the full-on assault of “Rushin’” (complete with police sirens in the distance), but for my money, it’s the simplest of the four, “Circuits,” that hits hardest—if “hard” is really the right word for a tune whose movements appear to be predicated on yo-yo tricks.
Foreigner: Visible EP (Livity Sound)
Melbourne’s Willis Anne, of the LAN label, makes machine-centric techno and footwork that’s infused with dreamscape synths and Detroit funk, both dubbed out and tripped out. But he’s never sounded tripper than he does on his debut EP under a new alias, Foreigner. He lays it all out on the opening “Last Peoples,” with dissonant string synths and woozy LFOs bouncing out of time against a relentless staccato drum attack, to incredibly uneasy ends. The title track reveals the record’s contradictions, with chilled-out pads draped over jabbing drum programming that’s wreathed in metallic slapback delay. On the flip, “Désintégration” offers a slightly more controlled mix of “Last Peoples,” while “Land One” smooths out the title track’s chords and groove into a slinkier, housier shape, rounding out a fascinating set of theme and variations.
Balmat News
Stephen Vitiello with Brendan Canty and Hahn Rowe: Second (Balmat)
Balmat’s first foray into post-rock (or even post-punk?) is out now; it’s a spellbinding three-way conversation between ambient lifer Stephen Vitiello, ex-Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty, and the prolific violinist and multi-instrumentalist Hahn Rowe, of cult ’80s New York band Hugo Largo. I love everything we put out on Balmat, but this one is particularly special.
Patricia Wolf: Hrafnamynd (Balmat)
Here’s another special one. Patricia Wolf’s debut album, See-Through, is one of the most beloved records on the label; now she returns with the soundtrack to Edward Pack Davee’s Hrafnamynd, an unconventional autobiographical documentary about Iceland, memory, and ravens. This time, Wolf worked primarily with the UDO Super 6 synthesizer, once again attaining a rare combination of melody and ambience.
That’s it for today—thanks for reading!
That Nadah El Shazly record is great. Saw her at Primavera and she is a total star. Also, to absolutely no one's surprise, I am a big fan of Simo Cell's big Frenchisms.