Abadir’s ‘Kitbashing’ is a Post-Club Soundtrack to Doom Scrolling

Berlin-based Egyptian producer and sound engineer Abadir returns with a new post-club LP, ‘Kitbashing’. The record, conceived as part of a new audio-visual project with Nicolo Cervello, marks Abadir’s third release on the UK imprint SVBKVLT.

Arguably, a linchpin of the region’s experimental club music scene, Abadir has carved out a distinct sonic identity through productions that consistently feel ahead of the curve. In his latest offering, ‘Kitbashing’, he reflects on the algorithms and the endless feedback loop of social media in our technological age, crafting seven experimental cuts that are oddly otherworldly.

Frustrated by how doom-scrolling “reduced our reality to a timeline of curated aesthetics” out of our control, Abadir uses samples from Instagram reels, posts and sponsored ads as the source material for his sound design to shape hard dance mutations. The result is a collage of micro edits and hyperactive rhythms that, while some might view as violent, remains deeply musical at its core.

Tracks like ‘Kicks and Clickbaits’, and ‘Scroll Hole Syncopation’ start deceptively on a calming note of dark and eerie ambient textures that then dissolve into a rich sequence of trippy and distorted noise textures and build-ups that keep expanding and contracting, akin to the relentless pace of online scrolling.

The serendipitous nature of ‘Swipe, Skip, Repeat’, most probably the record’s tamest track, contrasts with the sharp glitches and shattering energy of ‘Malign Velocities’, which in a way might be interpreted as a sonic metaphor for the double-edge side effects of social media; oscillating from a fleeting high that feeds our hunger for connection to a creative burnout of overstimulation.

‘One More Boundary Pusher’ is one of the standout tracks on ‘Kitbashing’ that manipulates traditional Egyptian maqsum percussion and Western club sounds into mind-bending post-club compositions imbued with a lot of footwork and dub-inspired techniques from start to finish.

With ‘Kitbashing’, Abadir subverts the power dynamics between human and technology, not only offering a critique of algorithmic culture but a reflection of how deeply it has rewired the rhythm of our lives, crafting a soundtrack for a world that can’t stop scrolling.