Vinyl LP
Since its founding in 2020, Palestinian label and art collective Bilna’es has taken a quality-over-quantity approach to its releases. Only their third release, Nos Habet Caramel | نص حبة كراميل is the debut from Cairo painter and producer Fajr Soliman (aka El Kontessa). With its collaged approach to experimental dance music—overlapping global club beats with traditional darbuka rhythms and hairline-fracture glitches—the record places Soliman firmly in the pantheon of Cairo’s innovative music scene. What distinguishes Soliman from contemporaries like 3Phaz and ABADIR, however, is her maximalist style. Like her wildly colorful visual artwork, some of which adorns the album’s cover, she packs as many ideas into each track as she can, never quite sticking to one groove, texture, tempo, or melody. Yet it’s not at the expense of danceability, informed as much by electronic experimentation as by tried-and-true rhythms from Jersey club to maqsoum.
One only needs to listen to “Ghaltet Meen غلطة مين” (Who is to blame?) to understand Soliman’s M.O. here. Sampling a famous political Shaabi song by Shafiqa شفيقة, Soliman throws its key elements—string flourishes, aching vocals, and a driving maqsoum rhythm—into a blender, reconstructing it as an electronic anthem. Coming in like a truck with a heavy kick and dubstep-esque bass weight at about 120 BPM, flighty strings signal for the first BPM change of many, bumping things up to 160 as a sparse, oddball beat shapeshifts alongside vocal irruptions and darbuka rolls. There’s another tempo rupture, and then the kicks turn into a blistering 4×4, trading blows with darbuka and the titular refrain before returning to a bit of traditional rhythms with what sounds like a variation on chiftetelli. Things slow down again, low synths droning on alongside a flurry of samples; when it’s time for the finale, Soliman kicks it back up with bursts of kicks and tambourine structured around a central dembow (if you tilt your ears another way, you might hear ayoub or wahda as well). It’s a hell of a track, and every listen reveals new sonic epiphanies.
Other tracks here are just as inventive. “Bingo” opens with a blend between Jersey kicks and malfuf, before introducing a series of ominous sawtooth and metallophone synths. “Mesh Marshmallow” is all aquatic immersion, the syncopated synth line weaving in and out of a maqsoum rhythm; later, the beat gets front-loaded, with sub-heavy kicks taking the lead alongside warbling synth. And just when you think she’s decided to end things slowly with a hip-hop flip of the Love Story (1970) OST, Soliman suddenly goes double time with a breakcore breakdown in closing track “Asanser.” Packing all of this into an under-30 minute total runtime, Nos Habet Caramel | نص حبة كراميل is a whirlwind of a debut.
