Description
There is plenty of room for the dark, the hypnotic, and the pensive, but my favorite kind of electronic music is high-strung. I am not sure I can think of a more high-strung record than El Kontessa’s debut LP, Nos Habet Caramel. This isn’t about BPM or aberration, it’s purely tone and intention. El Kontessa has been a DJ in Cairo for nearly a decade, and after several years of imagining songs she wanted to play out, began making her own tracks. It is a wonderful thing to imagine: floor-rumbling Mahraganat playing, some stern, heart-attack jungle track on deck, and El Kontessa visualizing these raw shards of synth, a subterranean worm of a bassline, drums programmed like a fistfight. Each of the seven tracks on Nos Habet Caramel contains this kind of urgency, this kind of menace, this kind of shamelessness. I’m reminded of some dissident early 2000s, Clarence Park or maybe Cosmic Mind Flight played at 45 RPM? That punkish energy, but like Chris Clark or Crack: WAR, El Kontessa never abandons the song. She maintains the listener’s ear, the builder’s intention of a great DJ throughout Nos Habet Caramel.
Released 2023 by Bilna’es, black vinyl, color sleeve
