It’s long past time to start talking about scenes in Egypt, Palestine, and elsewhere not just like some exotic foreign treat, but dead-center in the history of hip hop experimentation. ZULI casually drops his second Habibi Loops for free, and it utterly slaps. To quote one clip, “that’s sick, man — that’s dope.”
This is really post-internet sampling, covered in digital grunge and sliced in cleverly complex, asymmetrical ways. Nothing is ever a straight grid; it’s not just chopped into stuttered half steps but bent and twisted over itself like rubber. It’s a master class in shifting tempo. I say hip hop, but honestly, isn’t this where techno should go — away from its Kraftwerk trappings and the increasingly bland European “background for people not talking to each other while dressed in monochrome” landscape? This is music for nimble minds; like ZULI’s sets, stuff to dance to and break your shoes in.
So, what you need to do is download this and play it properly in a gapless player.
I’m thinking back to some of what fellow Egyptian-born producer Rami Abadir said on the panel here in Berlin this month — that the music isn’t “futuristic” just because some listeners in the West had consisted entirely on a diet of musical mayonnaise. But this is what music is supposed to do to us anyway, right — what our friends are supposed to do? Keep us on our toes, knock our music on our ass, and push us to be better, not let everything devolve to a singular Ableton Live template. And it’s not as though you can’t go out on the streets in any major Western city and hear the same grooves. You might just want to go somewhere other than H&M.
I like the description for this one (more than my own late-week rambling text); it nails the contents here:
Five years after the first instalment, ZULI revives his Swag Lee alias for a second pass at the Habibi Loops premise, leaning a little closer to “beats” without losing any of the mischief or extremity.
Working exclusively from scuffed, low-bitrate MP3 rips of Egyptian funk-and-jazz-inflected pop, Swag Lee fillets tiny inflection-points and holds them under a microscope. Instead of building tracks in the usual sense, the tape chains together sharp-edged loops, jagged edits, stop-start lurches and tiny breaths of swing frozen and reframed. Cut and paste is the operating logic, groove the fixation.
Threaded between the beats are short comic interludes lifted from Arabic reels and Facebook detritus, tiny sketches of Egyptian pop culture that interrupt the flow and flip the frame mid-tape. Where Vol. 1 leaned into abstraction, this one uses the same vandal energy to chase rhythm and body-feel, a crooked homage rerouted through ZULI’s experimental reflexes. Raw source, reckless surgery, and the loop treated as a unit of memory and mischief.
Previously, and in a totally different vein: