ABADIR
The Primitivist
Planet Mu
Let’s get this out of the way: The Primitivist is one of the year’s most powerful club records. In an endless sea of would-be bangers, it’s the rare release that will stop you in your tracks and make you think, “What is that?”
ABADIR, to his credit, has worked this sort of magic before, most notably on 2022’s Mutate, an album where the Berlin-based Egyptian combined high-speed maqsoum loops with jungle, footwork, Jersey club and reggaeton rhythms. The resulting hybrids were both relentless and invigorating, and made clear that any discussion of the hardcore continuum that doesn’t include the Middle East is woefully incomplete.
Hammering that message home isn’t ABADIR’s responsibility, but with the electronic music realm still hopelessly locked into tired narratives and the increasingly stale Berlin-London-New York axis, a record like The Primitivist feels like a legitimate wake-up call. Sonically speaking, it’s a bolt of lightning, one which puts a bassbin-rattling spin on rhythms and sounds he’s sourced from Iraq, Kuwait, Syria and Palestine, yet the record’s visceral pleasures are also rooted in a specific purpose: calling into question the culture’s unending fascination with futurism.
For decades now, electronic music has been obsessed with fantastical notions of what’s to come. Some of those narratives are utopian, but many more are dystopian, and almost all of them make Europeans and / or North Americans the protagonists of the story. As captivating as these visions can be, they also function as a form of multi-tiered erasure, not only eliminating the people of the Global South from imagined futures, but allowing the wider culture to ignore the very real consequences of war, imperialist aggression and economic exploitation that are already being experienced in regions like the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia.
It’s no wonder that ABADIR—who, aside from making music, also pens pointed music and cultural criticism in his role as an editor at Arab-language online magazine Ma3azef—has said, “If I have to choose between futurism or primitivism, I’d rather be a primitivist.” He’s taking a bat to some of electronic music’s most sacred myths, and doing so in a way that’s absolutely thrilling, loading “Habban”—the record’s blistering opener—with serpentine synth blasts and acrobatic darbuka and khishba beats. (For the uninitiated, the darbuka and khishba are both Middle Eastern hand drums.) Similarly rousing is the EP’s title track, which layers intense blasts of mijwiz (an Arabic woodwind instrument) atop its feverish percussion.
I could go on—all four tracks on The Primitivist are genuine head-turners—but truth be told, most Western electronic music fans (myself included) don’t even have the proper vocabulary to properly catalog what ABADIR is doing, let alone all the references he’s hitting along the way. That, of course, is part of the very problem he’s putting under a rather uncomfortable microscope, and speaks to why the work he’s doing, both musically and conceptually, feels so essential.