Cairo-based producer Rami Abadir returns with a four-track EP that delivers a visceral, foot-stomping exploration of Arab rhythm. True to its title, The Primitivist avoids the trap of exoticising or repurposing local sounds. Instead, it features Rami speaking fluently in a native musical language that is deeply rooted yet entirely his own.
It is rare to find music critics who are also producers, making it a daunting task to enter critical discourse from the studio. While many artists simply release music and let it speak for itself, crafting an album that serves as a critical statement is significantly harder. Rami has previously addressed this with his manifesto, “The Aesthetics of Darkness in Electronic Music: Between Dystopian Lures and Futuristic Fixation,” translated into multiple languages. However, the soundtrack to those ideas was still evolving alongside the text.
The Primitivist marks a vital turning point in that body of work. It is a disciplined collection focusing on precise Arabic localities and specific gestures rather than generalised tropes. The hard-edged rhythmic shifts, aerobic dancefloor relentlessness, and rapid-fire staccato samples that characterised his previous production are all present. Yet, the material is stripped back, stepped up, and unapologetic in its high-speed reimagining of folk patterns. From Egyptian Maqsoum rhythms remade with synthetic samples, the tracks move into exposed Darbuka and Khishba drums, featuring accelerated sounds from Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, and Palestine.
This approach feels like a direct answer to the themes Rami has explored in his writing over the years. While he has rejected European futurism, his earlier work, such as the fall LP Kitbashing, absorbed the synthetic fabric of Western technology and European life before reprocessing it. Kitbashing movedly constructed a quilt of sound from social media reels, suggested posts, and sponsored ads, drawing those elements back into his own musical language through intense micro-editing. Occasionally, amidst mouth-watering food imagery, Rami taunts his audience with hyper-cutup Ableton Live Session Views.
Now, the question becomes how to return to the roots and move away from screens without exoticising one’s own culture for Western consumption. This dynamic has plagued the history of recorded Arab music, even when Arabic artists presented themselves abroad. Pull an album cover from a Lebanese-American family record collection and you often find a parade of belly dancers and orientalist tropes in the liner notes sufficient to raise Edward Said from the dead.
The Primitivist, along with Rami’s recent DJ sets and live performances, offers a solution to this question of groundedness. It delivers dialed-up intensity and a commitment to the material. Western audiences are sure to enjoy it, but this can happen without the music being re-digested for them.
For further context, Menna Shanab wrote an extensive piece for YUNG titled “Rami Abadir on Sound, Theory & the Politics of the Present”.
Perhaps most pointedly, Abadir rejects any romantic notion that the Arab soundscape is a blank canvas for Western projection. He warns that Western critics often fetishise Middle Eastern voices (as Strings of the Orient or “mysterious” drones) without truly understanding them. Instead, he consistently steers the conversation back to the present realities of his society. His insistence on “living here” serves as a reminder that regional artists create art amid normal life – bureaucracy, politics, everyday joys and struggles – and that context shapes the sound just as much as any technology.
Do not call it a region; that flattens all that musical activity into convenient colonial categories and divides people, including fragmenting diasporas and interconnections. Rami has written about rejecting MENA and SWANA, terms sometimes even baked into locally-focused media outlets. He recently penned an anti-SWANA screed in Arabic, noting that the answer is simply to refer to the Arab world.
We have moved from Mutate to primitivism, the answer to futurism.
This evolution is enriched by a swirl of influences. Despite the focus and discipline, there is a mish-mash of sounds that reflects the reality of Cairo just as it does New York. Research becomes a way to focus on a particular section; in a separate evolving live performance earlier this year, Rami incorporated Eastern Christian chant traditions.
There is something deeply liberatory in this focus. I look forward to where it leads.
The Primitivist is out today, the first release on Planet Mu.
The Primitivist
ABADIR
ZIQ486
Key takeaways
- The Primitivist avoids the trap of exoticising Arab music, instead presenting Rami Abadir’s work as a disciplined, high-energy exploration of specific local rhythms and gestures.
- The EP marks a shift from the synthetic, social-media-driven aesthetics of Kitbashing back to grounded, rooted sounds that reflect the realities of daily life in the Arab world.
- Abadir explicitly rejects broad regional labels like MENA and SWANA, preferring to frame his work within the context of the Arab world to avoid colonial categorisation.
- Released today on Planet Mu, the EP represents a move away from futurism and towards a primitivist approach that values context and lived experience over technological abstraction.
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