Egyptian Producer ABADIR Remixes Ice_Eyes’ ‘Maps Of Despair’

Over the past few years, Cairo/Berlin-based ABADIR has quickly affirmed himself as one of the most exciting voices in Egypt’s underground experimental electronic music scene, both through his solo projects, such as his 2020 EP Liminal, as well as through collaborative duo ON4B alongside fellow experimentalist, Onsy. 

Recent projects have seen ABADIR step out of the spacious, beat-less, sci-fi inspired, ambient soundcapes of his project Aphasia and Liminal, diving further into the world of experimental club/post-club music. This latest release sees ABADIR remix Ice_Eyes’ track, ‘Map Of Despair’, off of the recently released Antipodes EP on French label Ernest D. Tapes.

While Ice_Eyes’ original channeled a tense, ominous atmosphere through surging sub-bass, rapid-fire percussion and anxiety-inducing background ambience, ABADIR’s remix builds on the original mix by shifting things in a more club-friendly direction, upping the tempo and introducing numerous layers of twisted, warped and pitch-shifted drum breaks and sampled mahraganat percussion rolls. The end effect is a dizzying east-meets-west clash of jungle, post-club and mahraganat; a combination that — unexpectedly — works incredibly well. Whether or not this percussion-heavy exploration is a one-off for ABADIR or not remains unclear, but regardless we look forward to hearing more from them in future.