‘The Screaming Abdabs’ Might Be ZULI’s Most Aggressive Work Yet

ZULI, one of Egypt’s most innovative producers, has returned with a six-track EP, The Screaming Abdabs, on local imprint IRSH. Picking up on the scorched intensity and dissonance of his 2020 record Trigger Finger, the EP doubles down on raw signal mutations, placing aggressive noise textures as the central sonic architecture, pivoting traditional mastering techniques for deconstructing sounds through layers of saturation and clipping instead of compressors.

As with several of ZULI’s releases, The Screaming Abdabs’ tracklist was shaped through road-testing and reworked across live sets over the past four years before arriving in their final form.

The opening track, ‘Abdabs’, serves as the sonic epitome of the record’s title, featuring vocal samples from ZULI’s long-time collaborator Elvin Brandhi, giving a feral delivery that tears through the track’s arrangement like a woozy signal reaching breaking point. Elvin’s vocals appear again, in a lesser darkly aggressive framework, on ‘Functional Rekordbox Track’ - whose title is a cheeky nod to the infamous DJ tool - the most direct dancefloor-oriented tune across the whole EP.

Meanwhile, ‘44’ draws exclusively on sounds recorded around ZULI’s old flat in Cairo, a colossal of everyday mundane recordings folded into a dense percussive groove accompanied by repetitive sub-bass hits. ‘Kosh’, however, expands the sonic turbulence further through deconstructed timbre layered within tightly wound structures. Following suit, ‘Half Empty’ -arguably, one of the most brutally abrasive tracks on the record - delves deeper into a heavier register with half-time percussion-heavy stomper textures.

The closing track, ‘The Screaming’, pulls back unexpectedly. Stripped of drums, the track drifts through saturated low-end and melancholic undertones - a fitting finale for the preceding extreme intensity of the EP.

The Screaming Abdabs is ZULI’s most aggressive release to date, a tightly controlled push at how far sound can be stretched before it starts to break down, and what surfaces in that process. The result carries a volatile, live-wire energy, further underscoring his consistency as one of Egypt’s most assured experimental producers.