Album: Baskot Lel Baltageyya

Artist: Baskot Lel Baltageyya

Labels: Wall of Sound (digital) / Akuphone (vinyl)

Release Date: Friday 5 May 2023

WATCH VIDEO HERE

Under metres of concrete in central Cairo, a relentless buzz rebels and forms a melody. A tired man tunes his machines to catch a snatch of it, and accidentally creates a playground where these abandoned sounds can flourish. They develop a sense of humour and an acid tongue.

This is the genesis story of Baskot Lel Baltageyya (which, loosely translated, means Cookies for Thugs), a project headed by musician Adham Zidan and poet Anwar Dabbour. On the Egyptian band’s debut album, Dabbour’s colloquial Arabic lyrics paint visions of a world spinning into chaos, where reality often veers into absurdity. Zidan, who produced the album in addition to writing the music, harnesses the madness with serpentine melodies that mingle and dance over hypnotic grooves like a psychedelic version of ring-around-the-rosie.

Zidan plays keyboards and sings in The Invisible Hands alongside Sublime Frequencies/Sun City Girls co-founder Alan Bishop. He honed his own style of lo-fi folk on Today Is Tomorrow, and is now expanding his horizons even further with Baskot Lel Baltageyya. Over the past decade, he has gained widespread recognition for his work as a musician, producer, recordist and mixer. Dubbed “Egypt’s musical renaissance man” by Scene Noise in 2019, he’s lent his keen ear to numerous other projects—such as Youssra El Hawary’s No’oum Nasyeen (2017), Tarkamt’s Live at the Necropolis (2018), Maurice Louca’s Elephantine (2019), Natik Awayez’s Manbarani (2020), and Nancy Mounir’s Nozhet El Nofous (2022)—and has collaborated with many of the biggest names in the region’s independent music scene, including Tamer Abu Ghazaleh, Nadah El Shazly, Raed Yassin and Sam Shalabi. 

Baskot Lel Baltageyya started as an audiovisual project, and from the beginning, Zidan has resisted the idea of it being pinned down as any one thing. As he puts it, “You can think of Baskot as a genre of music, a name of a group, or as something to consume.” The album serves as an extension of Baskot’s phantasmagoric live show. With his voice slathered in vocoders, Dabbour weaves his fragmented rhyme schemes with surreal images, odd characters, pop-culture references and imperative prescriptions for managing everyday life. “I rose from under the earth, got tired of the dirt / I found out that what’s above is dirtier—what a fucking ruin,” he sings in “Ma3assalama” (Sayonara), his robotic murmurs blending in with the fever-dream funk of Zidan’s zig-zagging synth lines and Mellotron flutes. 

Astute listeners can find links between the album and the dark absurdist humor that prominently featured in Egyptian popular culture before life became more absurd than the culture. You may perceive similarities to monologuist performances, or to the different shaabi musics of the region, or to old Egyptian TV scores, or to early electronic music, or to western psychedelia. Alternatively, however, you can choose not to want to view everything in relation to things you already know. Bridging the gap between experimentation and pop, Baskot Lel Baltageyya stands as a style, a sound, and an edible entity all its own. 

Baskot Lel Baltageyya was produced, composed, arranged and mixed by Adham Zidan. All lyrics by Anwar Dabbour. Mastered by Heba Kadry. Design and illustration by Tarek Abdelkawi and 3D Artwork by Mostafa Elbaroody.

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT: SARAH@SIMSARA.ME / ALYA@SIMSARA.ME 

Notes to Editors

About Adham Zidan and Anwar Dabbour 

Growing up in Giza, Adham Zidan hails from a musical family and was surrounded by music from a young age, taking in everything from jazz and classical music to pre-Hamid Arabic pop and movie scores to classic rock, metal and prog. After graduating university, he ran a theater company and worked as an actor. But he pivoted to music full time in the early 2010s, building up his skills as a sound engineer and joining psych group The Invisible Hands.

Baskot finds Zidan working more prominently with keyboards and synthesizers, adding on multiple layers of riffs and melodic refrains over a mix of live and electronic percussion. The songs’ lyrics were written by an elusive poet named Anwar Dabbour, the son of a cabaret organist who grew up eating breakfast with the barflies who would still be lingering at the after-hours venue when the sun came up every morning before school. Zidan and Dabbour first met at a downtown Cairo bar where Dabbour was performing; they hit it off, and when Dabbour sent him a few lines of poetry, Zidan found it impossible to let them go. “I needed more. I had never read anything like it and knew there had to be more,” he recalls.

Zidan convinced Dabbour that they should work together, and over the coming months Dabbour appeared sporadically whenever he felt like it, offering up a song or a few lines. Zidan was eager to include the poet’s voice on Baskot’s debut album, and so he patiently waited, weaving the music together with the words as they came. And in the end it’s Zidan’s fingerprints that you really notice on this project. Baskot is his most ambitious undertaking yet, representing a full showcase of his innovative skills, bold imagination and utterly unique point of view.

Track List

1. Baskot (Cookies)

2. Kheyana (Treason)

3. Esh 3arrafak? (You Know Nothing)

4. Cinderella (Cinderella)

5. E7tekak (Contact)

6. Ekhtefa2 (Disappearance)

7. Formet Enta El Amal (The Great Pie In The Sky)

8. Al Qam3 = Gebna + Arnabeet (Repression = Cheese + Cauliflower)

9. Ma3assalama (Sayonara)

10. 3azeezy.. (Dearest..)

11. Wa7sha (Monstress)

Credits

Produced by Adham Zidan

All lyrics by Anwar Dabbour

All music composed and arranged by Adham Zidan

Performed by:

Anwar Dabbour - Vocals

Adham Zidan - Backing Vocals, Organs, Electric Pianos, Mellotron, Synthesizers, Drum and Percussion Machines

Mahmoud Waly - Bass

Magued Nagati - Drums

Ayman Mabrouk - Live Riq and Tablah

Recorded by Adham Zidan

Buchla and Serge Modulars recorded at Elektronmusicstudion (EMS), Stockholm, Sweden

Drums recorded at Dream Studio, Cairo, Egypt

Everything else recorded at ThePirateShip

Edited by Adham Zidan

Additional drum editing by Peter Ayman

Pre-mix and Final Mix by Adham Zidan

Additional mixing by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh

Mastered by Heba Kadry

Layout, design and illustration by Tarek Abdelkawi

3D Artwork by Mostafa Elbaroody

About Wall of Sound

WoS is a Saudi based record label that helps original artists unearth, develop and release their sound. Delivering genre bending underground music from across the region to your favourite playlist. 

About Akuphone

Launched in 2015, Akuphone is a French record label based in Paris. Created by Fabrice Géry (aka Cheb Gero), this independent name is dedicated essentially to rare global Pop & Folk Music. From the 1940’s to the 90’s, from 78-rpm microgroove to cassette tapes, Akuphone handles the whole range of audio broadcasting formats. Akuphone’s productions are limited editions that range from new extended releases of vinyl records to creating original best of albums of artists and thematic compilations, as well as productions of today’s artists.