It’s about time we shouted at El Mahdy Jr. properly on these pages. The Algerian born producer dropped his debut LP The Spirit Of Fucked Up Places on Boomarm Nation back in 2013, and properly fucked us up with it. Hell, we liked it so much we bought it on cassette as well as vinyl.
With three plates on three different labels last year closed off a killer 12 months, but at long last what we’ve really been hanging for, the follow up album, got a release earlier this month. Coming to us on Discrepant Ghost Tapes digs deeper in to the El Mahdy Jr. recording and collection archives for source material, cutting up the tapes in to a half-hour two-track LP.
Where The Spirit Of… operated as a plate of killer rhythms created with an unfamiliar tool kit, the nature of a two track LP has allowed El Mahdy to create two fully immersive experiences. Once again the sample kit weighs heavily with his influences from Turkish pop (where he currently resides) and the structural rawness often associated with his country of birth.
Ghost Tapes is deeper than what we’ve previously heard, wearing it’s source material as a badge of honour rather than a launching point for a steppers tune. The field recordings, as ever with this style of material, remain eccentrically exotic to our ears. On the A-side, the intricacies in what he’s placed where and how he repeats it rivals the work of the great Kink Gong, but remains more musical in it’s overall delivery.
The flipside carries this on, with more voices and already processed productions coming together to create something bigger than their original parts. And with Mahdy presenting this to us as completed pieces we’re shown the experimental path that he might pursue in the future.
A cracking release here, mastered by the great Rashad Becker. Don’t sleep.
via Discrepant
The haunting collages of Turkey resident El Mahdy Jr come to discrepant with the appropriately named Ghost Tapes LP. Born in Sidi Bel Abbes, Algeria, El Mahdy Jr. and his family fled the Civil war of his native Algeria in the 90 s, relocating to Turkey. Upon returning years later to Algeria, Mahdy started working as a French-Arabic translator, first in Algeria and later in Burkina Faso. Sick in bed with malaria, he began to paint sonic pictures of his travels in exile; digitally decoding a hazy trance- induced melting of his native Algerian music, Turkish folk, the furious Poly-Rhythms of West Africa, and his love of slow, low slung Rap beats.
The result was the acclaimed LP ‘The Spirit of Fucked Up Places’ (Boomarm Nation, 2013). Ghost Tapes goes deeper into El Mahdy’s very own personal soundspace, in the artist words: ”Ghost Tapes is a composition of everyday fragments based on found tapes, field recordings, beats and radio frequencies. A ruff attempt of interpreting the cultural ghost that surrounds the field and makes the difference between place and space.” El Mahdy Jr, 2015.