Willillah Takes a Breakcore Trip Down a Jazz Rabbit Hole on New EP

Lebanese DJ and producer, Willillah, has recently released a new EP, ‘Breakcore & Béchamel’ on her label High Hats Community - and it is anything but polite listening.

On ‘Breakcore & Béchamel’, Willillah takes her forward-thinking sound up a notch, crafting a patchwork that subverts dancefloor decorum, incorporating various samplings that feel as if thrown in together with a sense of reckless abandon. She toys with the notions of structures, challenging what we consider composed or acceptable in music form through experimental noises.

The record leans heavily into breakcore’s fractured, rapid fire drum edits, with erratic tempo shifts. Drums feel as if they are crashing and shattering, coming at you from odd angles, totally unpredictable. It’s loud, restless and constantly on the very brink of collapse - and perhaps that’s exactly what makes it compelling and refreshing.

Each track tells its own warped little story, like characters in a more trippy version of Alice in Wonderland. The opening track, “Then I Took a Shower” is a wash of static and glitches imbued with anxiety. It kicks off as more of a caricature auto-tuned vocal sample that gets splintered with breakbeats. 'Bravo Bobi C’est très Prope' is a playful interplay of drum n bass and slippering piano runs with glitch-punk breakcore as the backbone.

'The Story of a Grieving Clown', however, is the emotional core of the EP, a tragicomic spiral of fractured clownery laughter, where jazz chords pop in like surprise guests, and circus horns stumble through a jungle-imbued mix. The sudden shifts and breaks throughout the whole production feels like flipping through bittersweet memories while someone keeps changing the channel.

'This One is For My Friend Sawsan' resembles a ragtag Balkan jam session crashed into a glitch-noise opera with overlapping frequencies, while the closing track, 'A Nice Jazz Outro' deceptively feels like a moment of wind-down, a glimmer of release after so much of tension, where gypsy jazz-inflected tones push through the chaos for a final breather.

'Breakcore & Béchamel' is a bold EP that destabilizes your expectations. It’s messy, at times overwhelming, but it’s also strangely moving. Much like the bechamel sauce in its title, it coats everything in a strange, sticky unity, surprising at every turn and demands quite the speed-induced grotesque footwork on the dancefloor.