The Breakdown
Where is Egyptian-born, Montreal-based producer, vocalist, composer, Nadah El Shazly likely to be heading with her second solo album ‘Laini Tani’ (out now on One Little Independent)? From a starting point in the Egyptian capital’s only Misfits cover band to a debut album, ‘Ahwar’ which placed her at the centre of the Cairo leftfield scene, then onto an award-winning film soundtrack before last year’s glitch noise extravaganza ‘Pollution Opera’ with Bridgend’s own maverick Elvin Brandhi, El Shazly’s next step is always hard to predict. More of the same just doesn’t apply to this sound artist who prefers to shake the fence rather than sit on it.
So unsurprisingly ‘Laini Tani’ emerges as an album that’s singular and wilfully unique, the forging of evocative vocals, Arabic timbres, electro-acoustic vibrancy, avant-garde perspectives into a body of emotionally complex experimental pop. Opener Elnadaha sets out El Shazly’s expansive intentions on this album. It’s a song that soothes persuasively, shimmering between a shoegaze mistiness and a Cocteau’s ethereal sigh. The melody trickles from the fresh hydraulophone patterns and perky synth lines while the cosmic tingle of harp and dramatic Egyptian strings swoon. Nadah El Shazly is taking a hyperpop moment here as her vocals daringly drift between waspish pitches and off-kilter swoons.
Co-producing with the illusive Cairo DJ 3Phaz seems to have injected added focus and economy into El Shazly exploratory inclinations. On Kaabi Aali, an urban night-life love song, her rich vocal elegance is left to flow with a swirling synth counterpoint. The rhythms compliment the tune’s shaabi intentions, the shunting beats and rapid snare rattles looping motorically while letting the sultry emotions purr without distraction. Keeping the percussive pulse locomotive and regular is in stark contrast to El Shazly’s wild fractured beats on her collab with Elvin Brandhi last year, but this suits ‘Laini Tani‘s more reflective songs. The hazy beauty of Eid rolls with a kind of Karmacoma, trip hop dreaminess while Sarah Pagé’s sensitive harp ripples around El Shazly’s delicately autotuned phrases. The singer says the blissful song aims to echo those “late summer night hallucinations” and yes, the tune levitates.
‘Laini Tani’ doesn’t get locked into one woozy dimension though, the album still carries El Shazly’s inclination to dig deeper into her experimental core. The bass bin agitation of Dafaa Robaai hits out at communal damage and decline through slicing shards of KULI-esque cross rhythms. Banit has a ceremonial reverence about it, sparse daf beats, looped signals, layered whispers and gasps all casting spells around El Shazly’s softy imploring vocals. There’s an air of Arooj Aftab majesty about the song. Perhaps the most abrasive cut comes with the frantic, unstable electronics of Enti Fi Neama, wheezing and whistling eerily like a de-commissioned fairground organ as it soundtracks a restless city-scape.
Unsurprisingly ‘Laini Tani’ may emphasise that Nadah El Shazly’s music comes hard wired with the chaotic vitality of her home city but the album also exposes a set of deeply personal, probing songs which are spiked with complexity. The restorative Labkha is a meticulously detailed electro-acoustic gem. A song which El Shazly describes as “letting out a cry and having a good sleep afterwards, that would heal a broken heart ”, it’s entwined with a poetic flow. Harpist Sarah Pagé magics this reverential atmosphere, taking sensitive care of El Shazly’s delicate almost weary voice. That creative understanding with Pagé, a central figure in the Montreal experimental scene, is key to this album’s fluent soundscape. The partnership began in 2017 on El Shazly’s debut and has continued both in performance and the studio since then. It’s the haunting title track which fully highlights the intuitive dynamic in this fertile musical relationship as the passages uncurl from a point of calm to something more doubtful and unpredictable. Pagé plucks bluesy bent, miniscule notes, she riffs, she contours her patterns around the sinews and syllables of El Shazly’s spiralling vocal as the song pulses with tense energy.
The dynamic range of this album comes with a real sense of purpose and sense of direction. There’s little experimental show-boating here. Final track Ghorzetein has the necessary heft to bring down the curtain with a crescendo and sense of finality. Throbbing with a brooding intensity, the suspense is heightened by Hitchcockian staccato strings and Patrick Graham’s thunderous tumbling drums which cut through the droning undertow. The swell is dramatic, an industrial percussive rampage which ends in abrupt silence.
Nadah El Shazly a seeker and scholar, an absorbent musician who drinks in the sounds of her worlds whether Cairo or Canada, Indonesia or Uganda and thrives. ‘Laini Tani’ sees her sonic artistry growing in significance and alongside her peers, KULI, Faten Kanaan, Jerusalem In My Heart, she’s pushing experimental music towards more visceral, lived in places and spaces.
Get your copy of ‘Laini Tani‘ by Nadah El Shazly from your local record store or direct from One Little Independent HERE
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