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Mhamad Safa's debut for Lee Gamble’s UIQ label is a revelation: anodised hi-gloss polyrhythms and aerobic mystic drills splayed against airlock electronics and occult, ritualistic vocals, an utterly compelling study in speculative rhythmic theory, exploring odd integers of Arabic and East African percussive traditions highly, highly tipped if yr into Slikback, Amazondotcom, Zuli, Xenakis! Situated between London and Beirut; architect, researcher and musician Safa draws from a layered history of musical invocations - Moroccan and West African Gnawa, North African Rai, Sea Music, Laywa and Samiri from the Arabian Peninsula and pre-Arab Amazigh traditions - to build ultra-modernist structures that don't erase the past, but embrace it. IBTIHALAT is a wildly futuristic album of chromium-plated sound design, hi-end micro-sampling techniques, algorithmic psychoacoustics and field recordings, with a strong grasp of history, tradition and complex rhythmic structures. It's an album that never loses its momentum with precision-engineered experimental club velocity - while simultaneously drawing parallels with ritual music and dance traditions that stretch into medieval times and beyond. For all the high conceptualisation though, IBTIHALAT goes really fucking hard, with a visceral, immediately upfront kink that throws down thrilling, razor cut 3D ballistics and angles for dancers and DJs between the hall-of-mirrors shadowboxing of ’Supranomadic’ and the ricocheting recursions of ‘Bel Abbes’, and the elasticated Raï trills of ‘Ouda And The Strikers At Najd’ and fleet, holographic rhythmelody of ‘Gazelles’. The more tonal-based works such as ‘Liturgis For Cyborgs’ with its glassy shards of harmonic geometry, and the shatterproof plong of ‘Fugues’ secrete complex rhythms more discretely in their make-up, and help define the album’s striking off-kilter balance between human/post-human urges and occult remainders. If you’ve copped heat from Slikback, ZULI, Lee Gamble/Motor System, Autechre - this will do you in, guaranteed - Boomkat Ibtihalat is a cyclical and boundless summoning of an otherworldly force in the face of geographic calamities and contingencies. These invocations are inherent to the musical traditions of Gnawa, Amazigh, Rai in North Africa and Sea Music, Laywa and Samiri in the Arabian Peninsula. Ibtihalat is oddly metered, percussively charged with devotional sublimities that are a direct conversation with an overall obscene history of cultural coercion and extractive violence. Whether it is the emigrational history of the female-led performances of Taggagat in Saudi Arabia and the Laywa music of East African roots that was disseminated by gulf seamen, or the Za’ar / Samiri conjurations to communicate with the celestial. The compositions that make up the album introduce processes of musical synthesis and predictive algorithms, initiating rhythmic meters, accents and polyrhythms within beat-based compositions, that are inaccessible through dominant tools in music production. While drawing resonances between these styles and their overlaps with dance music, Ibtihalat contemplates musical futures of these practices within geographies morphed by an unprecedented migration, logistical and extractive accelerations. Mhamad Safa is a musician, architect and researcher, based between London and Beirut. Safa’s work focuses on multi-scalar spatial conditions and their sonic make-ups. He explores their intersections with aural legacies of traditional and subcultural practices as well as environments of conflict and violence. He conveys these auditory inquiries by assembling sound design, micro-sampling, algorithmic sound technology, psychoacoustics, field recordings, and their graphic interpretations. Culminating with heavily percussive and rhythmically odd interventions, these sonic irregularities are often repurposed as speculative experimentations on the futures of dance culture. released April 29, 2022 Written and Produced by Mhamad Safa Mixed by Karl Choueiri Mastered by Rashad Becker Design by Anamika Singh This album was made with the support of The Arab Fund For Arts and Cultures Thank you to Amna AlNowais, Jad Atoui, Hisham Awad, Lawrence Lek & Anthony Sahyoun