Behind a veil of alias’ Amr Alalamy has cultivated a sonic duality, one that stays true to his near-decade pedigree of blunt force beat-tracks, whilst establishing an abstract style of spatial, architectural horror.

Under the primary monikers of 1127 and Tor5y his work, alongside a debut LP, includes dozens of tracks, edits and VIPs that snarl with a unique, uncanny modification of dark-side DNA, and is known with high regard in and beyond the musical circles of MENA for crafting phantasmagoric instrumentals which often then serve as a backdrop for rappers to weave lyrical webs.

Coiled in a double-helix, the tracks built in reference to hardcore, grime and trap run parallel to elastic chasms and digital decimation, primarily displayed on “Tqaseem Mqamat Elharam 2017-2019” and the subsequently released, no less eloquent off-cuts. Here, in a continuous, contextual flow of invisible sequences, once commanding rhythms are reduced to disbelieved spectres, whilst the opaque, devouring framework of Alalamy’s sound displays it’s cannibalising capabilities as it repeatedly collapses and remodels across forty-two minutes. Unpredictably ciphering and deciphering, returning, autonomous loops and detailed compositions carry the sprawling soundmass of the artist’s shattered attention span out of cramped, windowless club basements and into new dynamic environments, absorbing the glare and exploring the chaos of inner-city Giza.

Initial experiments took place throughout Alalamy’s own remodelling, amidst a season of drastic change brought on by the relocation from the United Arab Emirates back to his hometown, signalling an abrupt end to an introverted existence and brief forays in writing lyrics. “There was no way for my life to continue as it was in the UAE”, begins Alalamy, as he articulates how traversing the congested metropolis of Cairo and Giza on multiple, daily bus journeys to attend college marked the start of a circumstantial “deconditioning”. As a mind once settled in the almost-social interactions of cyberspace began to tentatively unfold in it’s new surroundings, Alalamy began to write tracks and, under the alias of Cellar Door, draught abstract, dub-cratered forms that in their centreless, transient nature, capture an already exhausted city’s reception of a new soul.

However, in a post-2011 Cairo Alalamy soon found himself operating amongst a small group of driven artists wishing to head in new directions. While the political liberation of the time is often now calmly viewed on a wider scale as little more than a continuing downward trajectory, there was a, if at all brief, few years where arts and culture in Egypt’s capital found itself under more forgiving circumstances. Between 2011 and 2014 Alalamy was welcomed into the encouraging environments of bricks-and-mortar organisations, namely the studio, label and frequent events engine, 100copies and latterly, an ambitious, seemingly magnetic, trial-error collective-come-nightclub, VENT.

These new, geographic planes would provide Amr with a humble debut live show, as well as a DJ residency at VENT and were naturally, perhaps more crucially, the nucleus of numerous collaborations. However obvious it may seem, it is worth noting then the catalytic force that shared spaces played in developing the conscious aesthetic of the city’s collective artistic counter-narrative, one that can still be felt and is widely displayed on the musical showcases curated by labels like HIZZ and irsh.

To find a contextual example though, one need look no further afield than the particularly celebratory showcase of late-2020, “This Is Cairo Not The Screamers”, in where Alalamy and fellow local paladins of the sonically perverse manipulate the Egyptian street-song that bombards every journey through the streets of Cairo into menacing hypermodern productions. Through self-taught processing techniques and software plug-ins that are often zipped back and forth, artist to artist, the subversive pride and renegade joy of the collective is radiant as they welcome listeners to their Cairo. On here, 1127’s “gharbala 2020” contorts the original samples into a grotesque, barely identifiable cadaver, embalming them in blown out, low-slung frequencies and drum patterns. An enigmatic display of sulphuric beatdowns that erratically bulk-up and metamorphosise as they inhale the emitting fumes of spiralling free-tekno whilst layered, time-stretched vocal verses appear, then reappear as though writhing, biomechanical demons are conducting the climax of some euphoric ceremony.   

As this fortuitous oxygen of somewhat-liberal policy supplied to artists and musicians was slowly being cut-off by 2015, so too physical spaces began to close, either under the financial pressures entailed from promoting styles of music which were by no means popular in the region, or due to the incessant gnawing of licensing bureaucrats.

“2016 felt like the end of bearable times, when the hope of being able to make a living doing music-related things felt really crushed.”

Under this weight. Alalamy’s work retracted back to the virtual enclosures in which it was first conceived. Tracks would begin to appear on compilations for UK-based Seagrave, as well as being welcomed into the boundless cyber community founded by the NON Worldwide collective, who also featured one of Alalamy’s productions on one of their first releases. Concealed within these various artist compilations, 1127 tracks invoke a cataclysmic, ballroom-cloaked frenzy. Stirring, steadying kickdrums bruise their way through chopped vocal samples and vacuum-packed static; focused, minimal tracks that deal in the tangible, visceral club atmospheres that VENT cultivated and owe, as Amr puts it “..more to sounds, rather than theory, the ideas behind the process falling more to art and experimentation than to music.”

It was around this time when Alalamy unknowingly began work on his debut album. Creating caustic audio-assemblages that bare a distantly mutated physicality to previous productions, experimenting with sounds, integrating other forms of art, conceptualising a new non-linear arcade for his work to exist.

“Having a passport is one thing, as many of my friends do not, but having music is a huge fucking privilidge... it is a way out.”

Here, another period of change is engraved in Alalamy’s work. The distorted incarnation of the photograph that adorns the front cover of “Tqaseem…” formalizes a cerebral exit. Gazing through a granite bore-hole into a deserted rose garden, the broad, almost surgical aperture of a statue’s skull tunnels to a sleepless, micro-observational existence, one where minute occurrences become vital events. In this restricted area of Giza, the rusting of an abandoned shopping trolley, the gradual advance of moss, the dehydration of untended soil; decay and stillness are experienced in real-time. Within this transposed perspective, the secular begins to blur with the surreal, the occurrence of chance happening in tandem with that of delicate composition, as if it were a fleeting invitation to a place of private worship, or an intersection in which to observe and augment the environment.

“You fall into despair or you try and get yourself into a head space where you can start to think pragmatically, instead of complaining about where things went wrong.”

Reforming his methods and refracting sounds into detailed and descriptive textures, in “Tqaseem Mqamat Elharam” Alalamy seems to replay the mangled remnants of near-forgotten dance music. Within the opening sixty seconds it’s as if a corrupt file of Splash’s “Babylon” has been pried open, barking guard dogs on high alert as seismic sub frequencies begin to shift, releasing a cracked, hallucinatory strain of adrenalin into the atmosphere. This is followed by “Renaissance”’s worn-out sorceress euphoria, again pitting phantasy against memory in a proposed harmony between the alien and the familiar, eschewing neuroreceptors like the fragments of a dream that have carried into morning’s reality. These theatrical qualities can be attributed to the trestles of it’s precise sequencing, a process that Alalamy shared largely with Hicham Chaldy, who would release the LP on his label, Nashazphone. In a cryptic play of schematic, cosmic-horror, the album serves to defragment the tension between a topographical chaos and a paranoid-critical anticipation of external, alternate forces, and as the vocal recordings and free drumming of She7ta Wel3a glide in, amongst arching sonic tentacles and a smokescreen of synth tones, the essence of Reza Negrestani’s writings are metabolised in “Tqaseem…”’s gruff aural lineage.

There is a notable continuation of these ideas in Alalamy’s collaboration with seasoned hauntologist and explorer of katasonic realms, Matt Liston aka Djynxx. With just one official release, Ain’s “Acid Tears”, released on Quantum Natives in late 2019, is a lucid communication in an unseen macabre, sending digital, heat-seeking sound-design to war with decaying, undead rhythms. Another important, more curational channel is Alalamy’s co-run label, ANBA, which has now given a home to sixteen releases. Most recently, 0N4B’s experiments in pressurized, chrome-plated glitch, “Bar(a)ca”, a work which recalls, then renovates the hallmarks of SND, quickly followed by an EP of sinewy cinematics from Lil Asaf, whose collaboration with Alalamy on the “did you mean: irish?” compilation is without doubt amongst both artist’s most emphatic work to date.