Mutate

Rami Abadir is a Cairo producer making chaotic glory out of various dance floor ideas, combining known forms like footwork with bits of Arabic music and letting the hammers fall where they may. Nothing here is shy about trying to move the room and everything in it. A shaker.

As a sound artist and producer Cairo-born producer Abadir has mostly focused on making “deconstructed club,”  like on the immersive Pause/Stutter/Uh/Repeat, and he has rarely included any sonic references to his heritage. On Mutate he does exactly the opposite, offering a collection of serious bangers that blend club sounds like jungle and footwork with the Maqsoum rhythms he grew up with.  You get a glimpse of his ambient and sound design background on the dreamlike “El 3ataba Interlude” which combines urban field recordings with eerie synth pads, but the rest is a barrage of chopped riq and darbuka rhythms, warped samples of vintage North African music and precipitous breaks. This is undeniably a club record and it goes hard, but Abadir adds enough experimental subtleties to make this a remarkable listen in any setting.