Premiere: ABADIR ‘VI’

Cairo experimental electronic artist ABADIR will release his new album, ‘Pause/Stutter/Uh/Repeat’, via Genot Centre in July. 

Using snippets of recorded speech as its primary sound source, ABADIR processes and scrambles these samples through flurries of electronic instrumentation, disjointed percussion and mind-bending FX. The result is a striking work of hi-def sound design, which intends to explore the intricacies of the human voice, and the significance that can be found in the oddities and interruptions to be found in our speech patterns. 

Speaking about the album, ABADIR says: “Uh, um, ah, urgh, so, well, I mean, indeed—in everyday conversation, we stutter, pause, prolong a syllable beyond its actual length, sigh, click our tongues and lips, laugh, and repeat. Such interjections and utterances and fillers may be considered superfluous to our interactions, even interrupting our flow of ideas. But, if we listen closely, we’ll find them loaded with deeper layers of meaning and affect: hesitation, thrill, discomfort, uncertainty, surprise, shyness, contemplation, or the agonizing search for meaning.

“As I extracted those recurrent utterances from supposedly coherent conversations, and the more I listened to those shards of sound in isolation, I came to the realisation that our semantic exchange has always been fragmented. This overpowering sense of fragmentation inspired a collage structure and infused the production with a deconstructed, dramatic and cinematic sound. In this sense, the collage technique in composition reflects how we construct meaning out of tiny utterances in our speech. ‘Pause/Stutter/Uh/Repeat’ is a distillation of overlooked communication, implicit expression and elusive meaning, all of which could be reduced in a one-syllable utterance. The end result was a canvas of revisited meaning.”

Below, you can hear ‘VI’, a euphoric collage of sound that appears toward the albums’ end. 

ABADIR, who is also the co-founder of audio/visual collective Mapping Possibilities alongside visual artists Nurah Farahat and Islam Shabana, has enlisted FRKTL, ZULI, Ice_Eyes and Fausto Mercier for remixes of on  ‘Pause/Stutter/Uh/Repeat’, with each artists reimagining the album’s tracks with their distinctive sounds. 

‘Pause/Stutter/Uh/Repeat’ will be released digitally and on tape on 2nd July vai Genot Centre. Pre-order it here