Abadir's The Primitivist is a high-energy rhythmic tour of Arabic sound

Cairo-born producer ABADIR is back with a four-track gut-punch of Arab rhythm, a foot-stomping, belly-activating powerhouse of an EP. True to its label, The Primitivist is neither fetishized nor repurposed: it’s Rami speaking in a native musical language that’s fully rooted and simultaneously all his own.

We don’t get a lot of music critics who work in production — which is to say, we don’t get a lot of musicians entering critical discourse. It’s a daunting task. It’s easy to make music and just say it’ll speak for itself, then go on and rant about whatever you like. Much harder is to make the album a critical statement. Music gestates in ways different from discourse. On the discourse side, we had Rami’s manifesto of sorts, “The Aesthetics of Darkness in Electronic Music: Between Dystopian Lures and Futuristic Fixation” — in multiple languages, no less. But the soundtrack to those thoughts was still evolving in parallel.

The Primitivist feels like a vital inflection point in that body of work. It’s a disciplined set of tracks focusing on precise Arabic localities, particular gestures rather than generalized tropes. Everything Rami was building up in production — the hard-edged rhythmic changes, the aerobic dancefloor relentlessness, the rapid-fire staccato samples — is all there. But this is also stripped back, stepped up, and unapologetic in its high-speed remakes of folk patterns. From the Egyptian Maqsoum remade into synthetic samples, we now enter into exposed Darbuka and Khishba drums and loops, accelerated sounds of Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, and Palestine.

And all of that feels like an answer to some of what Rami has been writing (or ranting) about over the years. For all his rejection of European futurism, there were also ways in which works like his fall LP and touring audiovisual work, Kitbashing, absorbed the synthetic fabric of Western tech and European life and reprocessed it. Kitbashing movingly made its quilt of sound out of samples of reels, suggested posts, and sponsored ads from social media. In a way, it was drawing those elements back into Rami’s own musical language, through a hell of a lot of micro-editing. (Occasionally, amidst a bunch of mouth-watering food porn, Rami taunts the rest of us with his hyper-cutup Ableton Live Session Views.)

But here we are: how do you get back to the roots, and away from those screens? And just as importantly, how do you do it without exoticizing your own culture for the West? That would stand in contrast with much of the history of recorded Arab music, even as Arabic artists presented themselves in the West. Pull an album cover from my Lebanese-American family’s record collection, like everybody’s, and you get a parade of belly dancers and enough orientalist tropes in the liner notes to raise Edward Said from the dead.

The Primitivist and Rami’s recent DJ outings and live shows provide an answer to that question of groundedness, with dialed-up intensity and a commitment to the material. Western audiences are sure to love it; that can happen without it being re-digested for them. (Erm, us. You get the point.)

For more on that, there’s this entire article by Menna Shanab for YUNG:

Rami Abadir on Sound, Theory & the Politics of the Present

Perhaps most pointedly, Abadir rejects any romantic notion that the Arab soundscape is a blank canvas for Western projection. He warns that Western critics often fetishize Middle Eastern voices (as Strings of the Orient or “mysterious” drones, etc.) without understanding them. Instead, he consistently steers the conversation back to the present realities of his society. His insistence on “living here” is a reminder that regional artists make art amid normal life – bureaucracy, politics, everyday joys and struggles – and that context shapes the sound just as much as any tech.

Just don’t call it a region; it flattens all that musical activity into convenient colonial categories and divides people, including fragmenting diasporas and interconnections. Rami wrote about rejecting MENA and SWANA — terms sometimes even baked into locally-focused media outlets. He wrote a nice anti-SWANA screed recently (in Arabic — but there’s the answer, just refer to the Arab world).

We’ve gotten from Mutate to primitivism, the answer to futurism.

And it’s great that all this comes in a swirl of influences. For all the focus and discipline, it’s also worth noting the mish-mash of sounds that are the reality of Cairo just as they are New York. Just listen to Rami’s influences mix. The research, then, becomes a way to focus on a particular section. (In a separate evolving live performance I caught earlier this year, Rami had turned to Eastern Christian chant traditions.)