Itfll Orchestrates a Post-Berghain Playground With New EP on IRSH
The Egyptian producer crafts four bass-heavy tracks that configure Arabic rhythmic traditions in a deconstructed club framework, using his handmade sequencer patch to bend syncopation and swing.
After making his mark on both of irsh’s ‘did you mean: irsh’ compilations, Berlin-based Alexandria-born producer and composer, Itfll, aka George Farid, returns to the Egyptian label with a new self-produced EP, titled ‘Nested Skins’.
The EP consists of four tracks that dive into bass-heavy territory while pulling apart and reconfiguring Arabic rhythmic traditions in a deconstructed club framework. He takes a distinctive approach to the production and sound design, using his handmade sequencer patch to manipulate syncopation and swing.
The eponymous track opens with a deceptively festive motif, an eerie, off-kilter echo of Christmas Carols, before detonating into abrasive synth-driven art noise and ricocheting pistol-crack percussion and hand drum smacks that sound like strangled gasps of breath. Meanwhile, on ‘Chasm’, quaky percussion serves as the backdrop for a methodical mixture of ghostly vocal fragments and disoriented kicks. As we go to the last track, ‘Maelstrom’, Itfll dabbles into the darker side of the left-field spectrum, with an experimental take that offsets its expansive low ends with galloping percussion that feels like an army of ants swarming your brain and dissonant bursts of white noise.
‘Nested Skins’ demonstrates a more refined and mature production style of Itfll since his release ‘Deflect Trial’ on the Kaer’Uiks imprint in 2021. The EP is a precise ensemble of subtly fluctuating micro-rhythmic marvels, haunted by ambient and rough industrial textures that feel like an unrestrained left-field alternative to the Berghain techno blueprint.
