For as long as he’s been putting out music, ZULI has stayed two steps ahead. The Egyptian producer switches up styles not just from record to record, but often from song to song. His debut EP encompassed noise-rap beats, lo-fi techno, Detroit-inspired futurism, and crickets chirping over bell tones. The leaps between releases are even greater: After the extreme abstraction of his moody 2018 LP Terminal, in which hip-hop and footwork were pulled apart at the seams, ZULI sank his teeth into a set of no-holds-barred breakbeat smashers on 2021’s ALL CAPS EP. A Cairo native, the artist born Ahmed El Ghazoly spent much of his childhood in London before returning to the Egyptian capital, a double displacement that he says gave him his sense of restlessness. “I think the move between countries instilled an urge to rebel against my surroundings,” he told an interviewer in 2021. He was talking about his preference for “niche” sounds over popular styles, but he’s just as reluctant to relax into a niche of his own making. Now, on Lambda—his first major release in six years—he changes course yet again, jettisoning the rhythmic force and focus of his previous records in favor of a spellbinding fusion of atmosphere and texture that spills over with nebulous emotion.
Lambda opens like a sunrise over a ruined city, vast chords of cinematic scope and symphonic grandeur swelling and morphing. A lurching electro rhythm rises and fades, speeding and slowing before abruptly falling silent, but what really drives the action are the tiny vibrations rippling across the surface of the music, a riot of unpredictability. ZULI’s productions have always felt unstable, but they’ve never been more precarious than they are here. His chords are a swampy morass; his textures shudder like ground liquefying in an earthquake, minuscule particles suddenly gushing in streams and bursts.
This palette—a thick slurry of buzzing synths and blown-out distortion—carries across the breadth of the album, lending a feeling of uniform intent that makes it the most cohesive release in his catalog. Despite the extremity of the sound design, Lambda frequently feels like ZULI’s attempt at pop. In “Trachea,” a heavily processed voice groans and gurgles over chords that gleam with the imposing majesty of Jean-Michel Jarre; in “Syzygy,” UK-born, Hamburg-based performer MICHAELBRAILEY’s shrill falsetto soars above a shapeshifting backdrop of synths and piano that’s reminiscent of Arca’s mutant assemblages. The majority of the album’s tracks feature some sort of singing, usually woven deep into the gelatinous mix. “Syzygy” kicks off an interconnected three-song suite in which voice and synths alike are ground to dust; in “Plateau,” a highlight, Abdullah Miniawy’s mournful incantations twist like smoke, twined with melancholy clarinet and a tremolo figure that delightfully, however accidentally, recalls the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now.”
Only once, on “10000 (Papercuts, Pt. 1),” do the vocals feel like the main event, as MICHAELBRAILEY intones a mantra of self-doubt and desperation over a roiling sea of molten bass and chimes. The song’s overt drama lays all its cards on the table; it lacks the intrigue of murkier, more ambiguous tracks like “Fahsil Qusseer,” an overcast trip-hop etude built around a poem written and recited by the producer’s father, Osama Elghazoly, or “Ast,” in which Coby Sey raps meditative, free-associative verses over a tape-warped music-box beat that becomes increasingly tangled over its two-minute run. (ZULI’s twisted productions work remarkably well with relatively straight-ahead rapping; I’d love to hear what he might do in collaboration with someone like Armand Hammer’s billy woods and Elucid.)
The sense that these mercurial soundscapes could suddenly veer off in any direction—careening from distortion-encrusted power ambient to illbient tone poem or electroacoustic composition—is part of what makes them so compelling. Even after many listens, Lambda’s abrupt shifts in both style and emotional resonance remain surprising. It took me ages to pinpoint the heavy beats running beneath tracks like “Trachea” and “Release +ϕ,” given the rolling waves of synth swallowing them up. ZULI has previously pushed back against expectations that he should somehow represent Cairo in his music: “They always try to inject political narratives, projecting their own ideas of what an Egyptian musician should be, and I feel like the concept of ‘an Egyptian musician’ is kind of ridiculous considering that we’re like 120 million at the moment,” he complained in that 2021 interview. “I don’t really consider myself an Egyptian, I’m just a musician.” On Lambda, he takes his resistance one step further. In refusing to deliver the kind of club productions with which he’s long been identified, he has created an album that sounds breathtakingly original, even by his standards.
