- Working across many MENA musical styles, Deena Abdelwahed's second album is a radical reimagining of club culture, history and geography.
- Deena Abdelwahed's debut LP Khonnar was a Janus-faced survey of the ruins of colonisation. Abdelwahed inverted the coloniser's gaze on the Arab-speaking world while also critiquing the homophobia she saw as endemic to her native Tunisia. Fusing traditional MENA instrumentation with dubstep, EBM and ballroom (to name a few), Khonnar was equal parts vicious and danceable, a ferocious club vortex churning with layered synths. The follow-up EP, Dhakar, was even heavier, weighted by drums slipping out of time over fizzling subs.
Abdelwahed keeps the political force on her follow-up LP, Jbal Rrsas, but changes the form. Working with a musically diverse team—including musician-turned-researcher Khyam Allami, composer Khalil Hentati and mastering guru Heba Kadry—and a new repertoire of instruments, it's clear from the opening horn riff and syncopated rhythm that her approach to MENA musical history has shifted. As Abdelwahed explained to Bandcamp Daily, "The music on this album is not related to folklore—I'm not interested in that." Leaving behind ideas of tradition, Jbal Rrsas is an exploration of global topographies and coordinates of dance music from Chicago footwork to Bahraini khaliji.
This emphasis dramatically shifts the tone and feel of Abdelwahed's music. There are moments of darkness, for sure (and a surprising amount of guitar solos), but the record is lithe and springy. "Key to the Exit," for example, builds into Abdelwahed's take on mahraganat, a festive Egyptian style of music whose contemporary interpretations borrow heavily from electro and EDM.
"Pre-Island" is equally celebratory, where hand claps and live drums duet with a suite of wind instruments. Even when the tracks get denser, she still keeps it groovy. The album's heaviest track, "Six as Oil," starts with a dabke swing, but halfway through it dissolves into an acid bath of pressurised bass and snare shots that have the ferocious funk of EBM-inflected techno. On "Violence for Free" Abdelwahed layers drumline over drumline, blurring tablas into 808s to create a hybrid form of footwork (all the while unleashing one of the aforementioned solos that would have Dimebag Darrell headbanging).
Unlike previous records which were held together by her voice, Jbal Rrsas uses vocals more like rhythmic elements. But when she does sing, the tracks truly shine. She lands somewhere between Joni Mitchell reading spoken word poetry and a gospel singer on tracks like "Complain" and "Each Day." Her voice on "Complain" is particularly striking, hitting unexpected high notes with her husky gravel over syncopated kicks.
Abdelwahed's music has always turned on an axis of reappropriation—what she's described as reclaiming a cultural and musical identity from Western ideas of exoticism. On Jbal Rrsas she goes even further. She told DJ Mag that "the idea was to make something that puts no region over another region." In fact, the record's most radical aspect is its lack of binaries: between East and West, between traditional contemporary, between the club and home listening. Instead, Jbal Rrsas presents a bass-heavy melting pot where a completely new rhythmic vocabulary is being shaped in real time.
Tracklist01. The Key To The Exit
02. Each day
03. Six as Oil
04. Complain
05. Violence for Free
06. Naive
07. Pre Island