Zuli Numbers

Currently undertaking a residency at the prestigious EMS Stockholm, Egyptian producer Ahmed El Ghazoly makes a stunning 2nd mark on Lee Gamble’s UIQ label with Numbers, a ruggedly chopped but spatially hypersensitive suite of encrypted electronic rhythms and entrancing, mirage-like geometries.Boldly committed to his own niche between the folds of grime, techno and electro-acoustic dimensions, Zuli’s follow-up to the Bionic Ahmed EP pushes it’s loping designs into stranger, spaces within the sound field, finding an idiosyncratic ecology of frequency that finds room for dense, physical subbass, smeared vocals and iridescent motifs amid its morphing dimensions.The six tracks exemplify Zuli’s playfully paradoxical approach to club music, experimenting with tessellating dry and fluid textures in the dusty, humid London-via-Cairo swerve of Bow which cranks opens the EP, to the metastable techno momentum in the buckling rolige of CommProto, while She’s Hearing Voices feels like a smoking area between rooms, heard in a queasy but spangled state.That all feels like preparation for the second wind of the B-side, which convulses into action with the chromatic trance warp of What You Do and its grubbing Autechrian inversion, Tongue Chomper, only to slide off the page in Foam Home’s future primordial glob of melted dancehall.The hooks may be less explicit or tangible here than on his debut EP, but Numbers is proof, if it were needed, of a restless mind which is only just coming into its own.