Before I encountered the release we are about to discuss, the degree of me being familiar with Egyptian experimental music had been rather low with the exception of Mahmoud Refat, an artist who has already managed to become part of the renowned series Mort Aux Vaches of the Dutch label Staalplaat and many other albums.
And then, all of a sudden, I come across the minimalistically titled debut release dots of the project called ON4B, essentially a collaboration between two Egyptian musicians Mostafa Onsy and Rami Abadir.
I played the first track dotdotdotOne and held my breath in anticipation of something exotic. To my greatest surprise, what I heard was an electronic tune that was very reminiscent of Bola in its atmosphere and then joined by an experimental rhythm section. Following the first track, came dotdotdotTwo, that could be certainly defined as baseline for this album. Juicy glitches and creaks that were rather organically diluting aerial ambient sounds. After that one, the musicians were mostly focusing on the melody and it was only at the final piece dotdotdotSix that they returned to the experimental rhythms as the main foundation of the composition.
It would be a shame to ignore the original artwork of the album, put together by Czar ML to underline the mechanic nature of dots.
Even though, you can clearly hear a certain limitedness and imitation of their British collegues, the musicians, gradually find their own signature sound. So if you are starved for aesthetically pleasing IDM and Glitch, we greately encourage you to get acquainted with this interesting novelty. It never hurts to expand your musical horizons after all, dear friends!
