A Closer Listen
tedzi تدزي‘s Mn Dehab may begin and end in drone, but there’s a lot of anger in-between. The Lebanese artist, now located in Berlin, uses the liner notes to express what is not explicit in the instrumental set, but which can be gleaned from its timbre.
The title track is awash in slowly rising, foreboding tones. tedzi writes about “exponential deaths (and) brown cities rendered flat … the immense evil that keeps growing.” One can intuit this in disembodied radio transmissions, abstract percussion, dissonant pads; the world is about to fall apart.
The five middle tracks occupy an unusual hybrid of non-linear IDM and industrial. “Drbk_101” begins with repetitions of five drumbeats, but they morph; sometimes a beat disappears, other times more are added. As off-kilter rhythms enter, only the tempo remains the same. “Dddaghet” leaps in with both feet, aggressive from the very start, as multiple patterns vie for dominance. tedzi remembers “webs of resistance” and the wisdom of ancestors, whose voices of protest haunt the dreamless breakdown (2:12), causing one to pause, even on the dance floor, and to consider all who have been lost, who will be lost, who are dying right now.
“Mesh [3ala Rasse]” is pure industrial, harsh and unrelenting, foreign not in its ethnicity, but in violence, a stranger to most but a constant presence to those under bombardment. A traditional melody enters mid-piece, but is drowned by the onslaught of drums. “Ma Ba3ed El Ghadab” is an unrelenting machine, an engine of destruction that slows at the very end, not because it is tired, but because it has completed its task. “Goomi” returns to rapid tempos and chopped voices and flirts with accessibility. “Listen Absorb Recharge,” writes Tedzi, deep in the liner notes but listed atop the Bandcamp page; “The future needs our batteries full.”
The concluding piece creates a wall of sound that slowly recedes from noise to drone, and then to ambient, and then to silence. It’s easy to sense the implications. Mn Dehab holds a mirror to the world, and dares the world to look back. (Richard Allen)
Tue Jul 22 00:01:34 GMT 2025