There’s music you can dance to, and there’s music you can unwind to. And then there’s music you actually need to listen to; intricate layers of sounds that need to be slowly ingested and dwelled upon in order to be fully appreciated. Garraya, the debut solo album by independent Egyptian musician Maurice Louca, firmly belongs in that third–and far more rewarding–category.
Taking its name from an improvised electronic "light looper" used for live performances by Louca and visual collaborator Tarek Hefny, the particular garraya that comes to mind when listening to this collection of tracks is one that is swiveling wildly out of control, shooting blinding bursts of light in every possible direction. The pace of the album is hectic, and soaked through with a sense of both urgency and despair. The notions of fixed randomness and repetition are experimented with and manipulated, building up into chillingly hypnotic drones and spastic, beat-driven freakouts. The music itself is nothing particularly ground-breaking–instead, the album’s strengths lie in the commanding talent of its composer, and his clearly obsessive attention to detail.
This is most evident in the album’s impeccable production. Despite the fact that the bulk of it was produced in his apartment, 28-year-old Louca–in collaboration with Mahmoud Waly, his friend and fellow bandmate from electronic trio Bikya–has successfully created an impressively accomplished album. Volume levels are flawlessly balanced, and each unique sound is given ample space to breathe. The same sophistication extends to the beats and arrangements, continuously evolving in the scope of a single track.
While most other comparable local acts are still plodding around on the path set by Radiohead, Louca is miles ahead, comfortably experimenting with Flying Lotus-levels of complexity. Samples are shredded and scattered, live instruments are fed into a multitude of filters, mutilated and deformed beyond the point of recognition. The sounds found on Garraya are not those of comfort and reassurance, reflecting instead the insecurities of the modern world. More than anything, though, Garraya sounds like the soundtrack to a really good David Fincher movie.
The album bursts open with the alarming "Seyana," a brief but electrifying intro that stuns the listener into submission, and is probably close to what it would feel like to gain consciousness while your parts are being brought together on an assembly line. This sense of self-awareness and paranoia bleeds into the titular track, which escapes the factory only to find the rest of the world chugging along on the same quivering conveyor belt. The album continues to expand at a frantic pace, like those nightmares where the faster you run, the more you realize the terrifying scale of the mess you’re in.
"Flood Lights" offers a few brief moments of relief and elevation from the carnage, a landscape equally devoured by rain and pixels, before "Late" grabs you by the neck and flings you through the air for the sake of its own amusement.
This relentless experimentation only increases in the second half of the album, and the result is a stronger, and more confident, quartet of tracks. Getting a grasp on "Half Tooth"'s warped beat is like trying to climb a staircase as it coils around you before disappearing altogether, while the following track, "All of That Time Flow" crawls out of the gutter and desperately clings to your feet, radiating all sorts of toxins and bad intentions. "Foaming," somewhat unsurprisingly, sounds like a seizure, speeding up and slowing down before becoming permanently unstuck. The album closes with "Repeat to Fade," a pulsating after-image of the deceased world, stubbornly lingering at the mouth of the void.
With Garraya, Louca has crafted a work of bruising intensity, and also unexpected beauty. This isn’t post-industrialist, or post-rock, but rather post-everything. Garraya is the sound of a technologically-driven world collapsing–music that can only be produced in a world where people continuously make the mistake of living like machines–and Louca perfectly captures the sadness, confusion, and–most of all–sheer frustration characterizing our slow, but inevitable, demise.
Garraya is currently available at the Townhouse Gallery store, and is highly recommended.
