If you’ve ever heard one of Simo Cell and Abdullah Miniawy’s tracks on a thundering club soundsystem, it almost certainly turned your head, even if you had no idea who was behind it. It’s not just that French producer Simo Cell (aka Simon Aussel) has a knack for dangerously contorted beats and speaker-damaging low end, a rhythmic and textural nous that has distinguished him as one of the most inventive figures in the bass-music vanguard; Egyptian singer, poet, and musician Miniawy has a voice that could cut through the thickest, unruliest crowd. He knows when to bellow, when to whisper, and when to wield his voice like a blade, and his singing, inspired by classical Arabic poetry and keyed to Arabic microtonal intervals, slips stealthily through the cracks of familiar Western scales. Their debut mini-LP, 2020’s Kill Me or Negotiate, paired Simo Cell’s most concussive productions with Miniawy’s hypnotic, mantra-like singing, yielding a collection of potent and unorthodox bangers. The two reunite on Dying Is the Internet, striking an even more idiosyncratic fusion of their respective talents while their music remains as heavy as ever.
Opening track “I See the Stadium” feels more like an experimental theater piece than anything loaded from a DJ’s USB. It begins with a low drone and the ominous huff of heavy breathing; Miniawy’s voice rings out against the quiet like a nervous question, high and almost chirpy. White noise swirls like smoke and Kenyan guest vocalist Lord Spikeheart’s sinister laughter punctuates the murk. Eventually, amid depth-charge bass blasts and Spikeheart’s death-metal growls, a beat assembles itself, at first vaguely trap-like, then closer in spirit to UK funky. Miniawy cycles through different styles: sing-songy, seductive, declamatory. The mood suggests a weird frisson between menacing and jaunty; you don’t really know where they’re going with it, and it seems possible that they don’t either. Is the stadium of the title some prestigious venue on their career bucket list? Or is it the scene of an unspeakable atrocity?
Miniawy describes the album as “a playful prophecy about the triggers of a new global revolution,” while Aussel says the title is meant to critique “how the internet lost its soul,” becoming “less about sharing ideas and more about surviving in a digital business ecosystem.” In the absence of published translations for all but two songs full of abstract imagery and oblique narratives, we’ll have to take their word for it, but the music sounds incendiary. Simo Cell’s instrument of choice is an 808 that sounds as if it’s been rescued from a house fire, giving his plunging kicks a charred patina, and he favors lurching syncopations and unexpected switchbacks. Miniawy stokes the unease by swerving between dulcet Auto-Tuned passages and pitched-down barks—you never know when he’s going to pop out from behind the beat, or in what guise.
The most destabilizing aspect of the music is neither the force of Simo Cell’s drums nor the slipperiness of Miniawy’s vocals, but the unpredictable way that their songs are structured. “Reels in 360” begins with a lovely reggae horn line from Miniawy before veering off into dissonant bursts over a lead-footed trap beat. “The Dala Effect” opens with a sweetly dopplering vocal melody over galloping kick drums, then flips to clipped spoken word and a double-barreled techno stomp. “Pixelated” might be the most labyrinthine of them all. Perpetually stopping and starting, running Miniawy’s voice through a hall of mirrors, the track presents a kind of ordered disorder: Every 16 bars brings a new noise, a new wrinkle, which gradually begins sinking in, becoming familiar from repetition, until the rug gets pulled again.
Even the lone instrumental track, the Miniawy-produced “Tear Chime,” keeps you guessing. Multitracked saxophones swarm over a pit of molten bass frequencies, slipping between sentimental consonance—you might momentarily be reminded of Vangelis’ Blade Runner score—and eerie discord. The mood is unsettled; the structure is amorphous and inchoate. Here, as across the rest of the album, you can feel all certainties dissolving.
