19.05.2018 by Guy Schwegler

No Need for Orientalism—Zuli

Zuli realising a new EP—Trigger Finger on Haunter Records—offers the perfect opportunity to publish an interview originally featured in zweikommasieben #14. In addition, the Cairo based producer and Daniele Guerrini from the Milan label curated the zweikommasieben weekly Spotify playlist.

The Cairo native Ahmed El Ghazoly released his debut EP, Bionic Ahmed, on Lee Gamble’s UIQ imprint in early 2016. That same summer he embarked on a short E.U. tour, which included a stop at Lucerne’s Klub Kegelbahn. There he surprised his hosts (and audience) not only with a stunning performance, but also with his British accent. As it turns out, El Ghazoly spent the first ten years of his life in London after being born in Cairo, and after a 1994 return to the Egyptian capital was neither able to nor determined to get rid of his accent.

Besides this brief moment of confusion and his great EP on UIQ, there are lots of other exciting things to learn about Ghazoly: he was involved in the founding of the Cairo-based music collective Kairo is Koming (KIK); he ran a club near Tahrir Square; he organizes an exchange festival between his former and current hometowns. Simultaneously, he also finds time to give Ableton lessons to many up-and-coming producers and DJs in Cairo.

 

Guy Schwegler To what extent were you influenced by the English music scene back then? And has any of that influence remained?

Ahmed El Ghazoly I left London when I was ten years old, but I grew up with Top of the Pops, MTV, and British television. I have two older sisters. One of them was a teenager back then and had a record player in her room. She’d buy all those cheesy records—Gloria Estefan, New Kids on the Block, Michael Jackson—and lot of tapes. I started making mix tapes when I was three years old. I also made video mixtapes. I used to love music videos. But that’s as far as music influenced me as child.

GS And later, how much did Cairo play a role? Did the city influence you, or was the main influence the Internet—more of an international thing?

AG It’s definitively just an international, Internet thing. Although Cairo did play a role in the sense that since we moved back, I kind of refused to…I created kind of an anti-establishment, punk attitude—anti-mainstream, anti-everything-everyone-is-doing. Obviously, that feeds into your taste in music. I was always looking for the alternative. So in that way, Cairo played a big role. But, ultimately, it was the Internet. I am the person I am today because of the Internet. I know everything that I know because of the Internet. I wasn’t influenced at all by the scene around me here in Cairo. That caused me to be a bit of a loner in my own cave. All I had was the Internet. It was great, really; I’m not complaining at all.

GS The limitation of that international Internet-thing you got confronted with during your tour, right? A flight got cancelled due to a strike and you had to catch another one which, because of a layover, would have needed a visa. How is it for you as an Egyptian touring Europe?

AG I’m not going to play the “visa” card. The blame is really on the strikes. If I needed a UK visa, I should have known. But it is difficult for non-EU citizens. I never thought of it, but it’s kind of ironic that my label and my agency are in the UK and I’m playing in Europe, but a visa stops me from playing a gig.[1] It’s not cool—not fun.

GS Now we’ve talked about both, that scene that’s not tied to a place really, and its limitations as well. Is place of importance at all?

AG My colleagues keep making fun of me because I have a slogan of sorts—I keep saying that geography doesn’t matter when it comes to music. We ran a space called Vent, which started out as a club—well, more of a music and art space which also had a bit of theatre—and we did a talk last January in Berlin about how much geography really influences our sound and what we do. And I gave an example back then: our resident, 1127, sounds English as fuck, but he’s never been to England. It’s all Internet. It is with him even more than with me, because he’s six years younger. All his influences come from the Internet and not from any particular scene that exists in Cairo. So the answer is no, I don’t think place matters. It might matter in terms of how it influences you as a person which, in turn, influences the music you make, but not in terms of sound.

GS Can you talk more about Vent? How did it start? How did it turn out? What is it now?

AG Vent has been a crazy ride, man. My partner, Asem, and I used to run this magazine about pop culture in Egypt and Cairo called Awesome Magazine. We were so disconnected from Egypt and Cairo; I’d write music reviews about Shabbaz Palaces, Shlohmo and such. Who cares about that in Cairo? No one. For some stupid reason, we used to be a print magazine. Yeah, I know…[both laugh]. And so—because we weren’t interested in the Cairo scene and we were writing about very niche stuff that no one cared about, we couldn’t get advertisers; we kept losing money until we finally went bankrupt. When we went to finish up the paper work with our lawyer, we found out he has another client who used to run a club one minute away from Tahrir Square—right around the corner from where the revolution took place. Ever since the revolution, that club stopped making money. The owner was looking for someone to run the place—you know—to partner up with. We were looking for a venue to run ourselves for people like us—musicians and DJs who didn’t get bookings, but who had potential and needed exposure. We had been vocal about looking for a venue for a while. Our lawyer was aware of our search and when he saw this opportunity, he put us in touch. After that, Asem, the promoter from the club, which used to be called Arabesque, and I ran the place for about a year.

GS When was that? And why didn’t the club do well after the revolution?

AG Asem and I met the rest of KIK [Kairo Is Koming—a six-person collective] in 2012, and we started with Vent in 2013. They tried running the club near Tahrir Square as Arabesque for another two years, but it went really badly. The kind of clientele that had gone there was afraid to go there after the revolution. It used to be a club for rich businessmen—with belly dancers and really expensive food. They were too afraid to go there afterwards. But the young, adventurous people would come to Vent.
Because of what we do, we had to have a certain business model—lose money on weeknights and book popular or international DJs on the weekends. If it’s an international DJ, it doesn’t matter what he plays, people are going to come. So we’d do that on the weekends to make up for losses during the week. And we were fine with that model—lose money during the week, doing what we wanted to do, booking people that we like, and then make money on the weekends. But, after that first year, the grandson of the guy who owns the building came to the club. He saw that it was successful and said, “I need to get in on this”. He had just turned 21. He talked to his granddad and they kicked our partner out—replaced him with the grandson.
So in comes the grandson—a young businessman from the Egyptian bourgeois. To him, a club is about champagne service, table reservations, and that stuff. So he tried to impose his ideas—re-made the decoration of the club to make it look like a cross between Hardee’s and a Las Vegas strip-club. Terrible. He started to interfere with our door policy, too. We had an unofficial gay night, which is a big deal in Cairo. Like most people in Cairo, our new business partner wasn’t very happy about it. He didn’t want homosexuals, people who didn’t look “well-off” or girls with Hijabs in his club—stuff like that. But the final reason we left the club was that he didn’t want to lose money during the week; he wanted to make money the whole week.
Well—fair enough, but throughout the time we were running Vent, we booked some really cool people from abroad who’d otherwise never have come—the guys from Opal Tapes, for example. Max [Ravitz; aka Patricia] also did a workshop on synthesis there. And we combined those international guests with the local people—forty of them debuted at Vent. Since then, some have been gigging regularly. So, I think it served its purpose while it was running.

GS You said before that when you book international acts in Cairo people are going to show up no matter what. In that case, were Opal Tapes and acts like that always a huge success?

AG Any international act in Cairo on a Thursday night is a huge success. So—yeah, a lot of people came. One night, Wanda Group played. He makes this cool ambient noise stuff. He was the first set on the line-up that night. This was already in the second year, so the interior had already changed and friends of our new business partner were coming to the club. There was this girl at the club who was wearing heels and a dress, her hair done all nice —she was up for a chic night. She was with her boyfriend, who was also done up—wearing an expensive watch and everything. Meanwhile, Wanda Group is playing on his sick ass fruity-loops-and-tapes setup, but it’s just noise to these people—“tsssssccccccchhhhh.” The girl’s boyfriend is hugging her and looking at the stage like, “what’s going on?” Seeing that type of stuff was a lot of fun. But yeah, our new partner had a different mind-set so we left the club in the second year, around July 2015. After that, we started to do one-offs in different venues around Cairo. But our model of losing money during the week and making it up on the weekends didn’t work anymore since we were only running one night at a time. Even though it wasn’t really feasible, we were still doing it. We also did a festival called Masãfãt[2] with the guys from Thirty Three Thirty Three[3] last September, we brought some Egyptians to London and some Londoners here—a kind of exchange festival. We’re also starting a Vent label.

GS What’s it like in Cairo now? Is there anything else happening there—a music scene or a club scene?

AG The club scene in Cairo is dominated by a specific sound—dance music like Dixon or Damian Lazarus. I’m not familiar with that kind of stuff. There’s not really anything going on that we’re into, which is, of course, due to the fact that the kind of people who have money to go out in Egypt are the rich people. These events are quite expensive and it’s more about the going out itself than it is about the music. That’s the nightclub scene here. One of the most successful nightclubs is called Nacelle. They also collaborate with a kind of entertainment scene consisting of cover bands and such. There is also this guy called Disco Misr, who remixes old Egyptian ads and stuff; it’s more like entertainment than music. But with regard to the scene that we were trying to push with Vent—there are really good producers all around the spectrum, but most of them are hard to categorize. We don’t have that many hip-hop producers, but we have a lot of rappers—a shitload of rappers—really good ones that no one knows about. Everybody is focusing on the Mahraganat guys, who aren’t even trying to be rappers. I don’t want to bitch about Mahraganat and Electro-Chaabi, but Cairo has so much more to offer. No disrespect. Maurice Louca, for example, uses Chaabi in a genius way. Islam Chipsy is also very creative. But if you’d understand the lyrics of these songs and if you were familiar with the old type of Chaabi—Chaabi is a very old type of Egyptian music that used to be made on Yamaha keyboards—those keyboards they make with the Middle Eastern presets—that’s how Chaabi was made. And Electro-Chaabi—the only difference between Electro-Chaabi and the old Chaabi is that instead of being made with a keyboard and a mic, now it’s made with Fruity Loops and a mic with auto-tune. Plus the lyrics are like…one moment it’s, “ohh, I’m gonna kill this guy and punch him in the nuts,” and the next it’s, “I love god; he’s the greatest,” then, “I’m gonna fuck her”—stuff like that. What are you talking about? And the biggest losers out of this Electro-Chaabi and Mahraganat thing come out of the rap scene, because the western media insists on calling the MCs rappers. I have no idea why. They say, “Egyptian rappers on stage”, but these are not the rappers; these are the Mahraganat MCs singing. We’re trying to do something for them with the festival—hoping to give them more exposure.

GS Perhaps the problem is that what they do—and maybe what you do, too—is not considered authentic enough.

AG Yeah, maybe you’re right—a kind of Neo-Orientalism. That’s against my philosophy that geography shouldn’t matter. It should be about the music itself. If you want to listen to something with Middle Eastern instruments, we have that: Nada ElShazly, for example; she uses Chaabi elements in a very creative way—not whatever the Egyptian version of trap is. But yeah, that’s pretty much the scene. A baby scene. You see—for a scene to grow you need venues and press, but we don’t have that stuff here. We’re looking for a new venue, but I’m also kind of depressed about it. I do my stuff with the venues and hopefully someone else will do the press.

GS Last question: how did the release on Lee Gamble’s label come about?

AG I’ve been sending him stuff on Soundcloud since January 2014. One day I was waiting in the car while my ex-girlfriend was buying something and I was playing one of Lee’s records in the car. When she got back in the car, she was like, “Zuli, I love you, but I hate your techno,” and turned it down. And I’m like, “it’s not even me, it’s Lee Gamble.” And she’s like, “who’s Lee Gamble?” and so forth. She said, “maybe you should send him your stuff.” So, I sent him a track; he liked it, and I kept him sending stuff. Then, when he started the label he got in touch and wanted to release something. I was obviously up for it. So crazy; it’s because of that Internet thing again—and because of my ex-girlfriend!

 

 

Since the publishing of this interview, quite a few things happened in Zuli’s world. To celebrate his most recent EP Trigger Finger, he and Daniele Guerrini from Haunter Records handed in some tunes to be featured on our zweikommasieben weekly Spotify playlist.

[1] The interview was conducted before Brexit.

[2] The Masãfãt Festival took place September 1st-4th in London and September 20th-24th in Cairo. Apart from Zuli, it hosted acts like The Sprawl [see zweikommasieben #11], Nadah El Shazly, Mark Fell [see zweikommasieben #8], Carl Gari & Abdullah Miniaway, Beatrice Dillon [see zweikommasieben #11], Sami Baha, Gaika, and many others.

[3] “Thirty Three Thirty Three create exploratory and inventive arts and music events around the globe.” (their Facebook page).