top of page
Search

Global Music Column – August

  • Ammar Kalia
  • Aug 18, 2023
  • 1 min read

Deena Abdelwahed – Jbal Rrsas

Since the release of her debut album Khonnar in 2018, Tunisian DJ and producer Deena Abdelwahed has been on a mission to recontextualise popular music from the Arab world. Her productions draw on everything from the maximalism of Egyptian mahraganat to shaabi wedding songs and dabke folk rhythms, while adding shape-shifting bass and the metallic textures of electronic drum programming to create foreboding tracks for the dancefloor.


Throughout Khonnar, she combined traditional percussion such as the bendir frame drum with thumping techno kick drums and distorted melodies, while 2023’s Flagranti EP ramps up the tempo by blending arpeggiated synths with samples of high-pitched darbuka percussion. It is that artful combination of darkness and danceability that gives Abdelwahed’s work its signature.


Read the review in the Guardian.


[This piece was published on 18/08/23]


Recent Posts

See All
Global Music Column – January

Toni Geitani – Wahj A rabic electronic experimentalism is thriving. In recent years, diaspora artists such as Egyptian producer Abdullah Miniawy, singer Nadah El Shazly and Lebanese singer-songwriter

 
 
 
The 10 best global albums of 2025

10. Sarathy Korwar – There Is Beauty, There Already A 40-minute suite of continuous, repetitive drumming might not sound like the most accessible music but south Asian percussionist and producer Sarat

 
 
 
Global Music Column – November

Debit – Desaceleradas M exican-American producer Delia Beatriz, AKA Debit, has a talent for making historical sounds her own. Her 2022 breakthrough, The Long Count, featured woozy, ambient soundscapes

 
 
 

Comments

bottom of page