too_basicc - عهد الأصدقاء

A Closer Listen

too_basicc is a digital audio-visual, modular synthesis project based in Beirut, Lebanon. Over the months of march-april they released three albums in quick succession with the latest being عهد الأصدقاء [“The Covenant of Friends”] — a title that refers to the classic Arabic-dubbed anime series originally known in Japan as Romeo and the Black Brothers. Where the debut العودة [The return] was dominated by abrasive textures, distortion and speedcore-adjacent assaults, and the follow-up (Per/Con)formative Linearity explored more melodic electro forms, عهد الأصدقاء pushes further into deconstructed club music and hyperpop while retaining the project’s characteristic volatility.

The album opens with a children’s chant welcoming George Bush to Kuwait, immediately framing the record through a political lens. Throughout, language appears in fragmented, distorted forms —warnings, slogans, commands and memories repeatedly emerge through pitch-shifted voices and heavily processed samples. Tracks such as “Speak” and “عظام” (“Bones”) combine raw detuned synth melodies, dungeon synth undertones and chaotic rhythmic shifts, creating music that feels simultaneously playful and deeply unsettled.

Despite its relentless energy, عهد الأصدقاء is not simply an exercise in sonic aggression. Moments such as “موت” (“Death”) allow the tempo to slow, revealing unexpected melodic contours beneath the turbulence. These pauses introduce a sense of reflection into an otherwise frantic album, suggesting that memory and mourning occupy as much space here as confrontation.

Like its predecessors, عهد الأصدقاء is driven by urgency. The production often feels deliberately unstable, with genres colliding and dissolving into one another before they can fully settle. Yet beneath the fractured structures lies a coherent narrative about memory, community and resistance. Rather than refining ideas into polished forms, too_basicc captures them in motion, resulting in an album that feels immediate, restless and inseparable from the political moment that produced it.

To elaborate on the production process and the themes of the album we reached out to too_basicc.

You released three different albums in rapid succession — العودة in March, (Per/Con)formative Linearity in April, and now عهد الأصدقاء. The first العودة is rooted in modular synthesis, nostalgia and political urgency, (Per/Con)formative Linearity feels almost more formalist and abstract while عهد الأصدقاء reduces language to chants, warnings and slogans. Do you see these albums as separate projects, or as different facets of the same ongoing investigation? What does releasing music at such a relentless pace allow you to do that a more traditional album cycle would not?

There was urgency in the making of the three albums, because that is tied to my impatient nature. For العودة, I started making it during the first few days of the ongoing war, so, it stemmed from wanting to leave something behind in case of attaining martyrdom, and that was urgent. For (Per/Con)formative Linearity, I had already adapted, but I enjoyed the process so much that I kept doing it non-stop, until I got tracks that I was satisfied with, and thought are fun to share after  العودة’s serious nature, and that also felt urgent. I started making عهد الأصدقاء after the traitorous peace talks with “israel”. So, with uncertainty and anger running high each day, there was a lot to be expressed, and that was urgent as well. So, if the ongoing investigation is how to adapt through war, then yes, they are essentially three outputs of the same function.

All three were made using VCV Rack (the digital modular synthesis software), but the approach was different for each. العودة is a compilation of years of synthesis sessions, purely about synthesis techniques, experimenting with sound design and trying to make it as musically adjacent as I could. (Per/Con)formative Linearity was done with the focus more on genres, analysing how different ones are structured and trying to put my own taste for dissonance into them, translating them into something I felt was different. For عهد الأصدقاء, I was mostly interested in storytelling and reflecting the current political situation, with a hint of nostalgia (عهد الأصدقاء is the name of a Spacetoon Arabic-dubbed anime) and history (PLEASE DON’T FORGET being about the Kuwait-Iraq war, specifically the submission of the gulf states to the amerikkkan oppressors, and BIBA (بيبه) being about the exploitation of impoverished people of the global south, specifically Sudan and Al Saeed of ِEgypt).

I haven’t thought about album cycles and it doesn’t fit my nature or workflow. To conform to a set time of releasing something while it is already done and I’m satisfied with the result feels performative. Releasing music at this pace allows me to express my many different unrelated feelings faster. And while this might sound like an obsession with fast production, I see no problem with it as long as it’s aligning with the speed of my emotions and actions. Across the different media I practice with, refining the end product was never in my practice.

Even in drawing or painting, I choose constants and variables, where the constants are sometimes the colours, sometimes the composition or the subject. When the colour is the constant, the variables become the lines and shapes: I scribble, then I find a meaning in what I have produced. When the constant is the composition, the colours are sometimes chosen randomly and then a meaning is given to wherever the colours happened to land. For video synthesis, the constants are always the music and the video input, and the output is the compilation of the different effects being synthesised from those inputs. The same way in music, for example, العودة was about sculpting each and every sound, then running them through sequencers: trying different sequences and drum patterns, all while being recorded. Then trying to compose the track and arranging it based on what I felt was adjacent enough to music I would typically listen to.

The title (Per/Con)formative Linearity seems to suggest a tension between conformity and performance, structure and disruption. Across all three albums, repetition plays a central role—not only musically, but linguistically. Words such as danger, death, peace, shame or entire phrases are repeated until they become something other than language. What interests you about repetition? Is it a compositional tool, a political strategy, or a way of exposing how meaning breaks down?

You got it exactly right on the first part. The name (Per/Con)formative Linearity comes from the fact that after the noise and chaos of العودة, I decided to perform conformity in a way that feels linear. I built tracks around genre templates: four-on-the-floor patterns, predictable arrangements, recognisable forms. Then I disrupted those structures from inside, with dissonance where the genre expects consonance, the wrong kicks for the wrong genres, samples that don’t belong to the form I’m building toward. The performance of conformity is loud enough to be felt rather than heard. The disruption is what keeps it from settling. Although repetition was merely used as a compositional tool for (Per/Con)formative Linearity), not as a means to convey something in particular, you do raise an interesting observation about عهد الأصدقاء.

The words used there were essential for the storytelling. The teller starts with a sample from a song dedicated to a war criminal (PLEASE DON’T FORGET). They then prompt the listener to SPEAK repeatedly. Then they move to another track telling a cautionary tale, where the sample is from a song from a movie (عرق البلح) about a village whose men abandoned it to go help build the gulf states (BIBA بيبه), and the remaining boy who stayed gets killed by the men who returned. After that, there’s barely anything left to say, making sentences too much work with no gain except feeling like a failure (SHAME) for not being able to help enough (compared to the work the resistance fighters are doing on the frontline), echoing the feelings we have when our resistance is confined to sharing posts on social media.

Later, the sentences disappear with the warning of TRAP, then come back in deconstructed form. Instead of “peace is surrender” (referring to the illegitimate “peace” talks our traitor government is pursuing), it’s just the words peace and surrender (Peace=Surrender سلام=استسلام), which sound similar in Arabic to the point that you don’t recognise which one is being said most of the time in the track, thus representing the thin blurry line in such an action. The teller then warns of DANGER (خطر) again, which will lead to DEATH (موت), conveying the severity of such talks and their ramifications.

After death comes “BONES” (عظام), because even in our death we remain in this land, if only as bones. Then we end with عهد الأصدقاء (Covenant of Friends), with no words or repetition, divided into 3 parts, telling the story of two friends (Nabil and Aabla) from different clans who simultaneously discover a water resource and tell their respective elders. The clans fight each other to annihilation, leaving the two friends as the only survivors, whose only response is to dig each other’s graves and kill each other. Because without their communities, there is nothing left, and that’s alright.

In the text accompanying العودة, you describe spending years accumulating modular synthesis experiments and later discovering an album hidden within them. By contrast, عهد الأصدقاء feels almost brutally immediate, as though it couldn’t wait to be released. Has your creative process changed recently? Are you becoming less interested in refining material and more interested in capturing a particular moment or state of mind before it disappears?

Precisely. عهد الأصدقاء was really begging to be released and the creative process changed a bit, or a lot, depending on who you ask. The change is the incorporation of AI, and with all the controversy around it, I feel like I have to pre-emptively defend myself for using it.

Practically, I wanted to make more structured music, and I had no idea how to do it, since I never cared about refining my music for other people’s ears. So instead of spending years studying music theory (or reaching out to more experienced composers for help) and the correct way to make each genre, I resorted to my assistant Claude. We coded the compositions to fit the genres I wanted to make. What started as just wanting to see if I could make a specific genre turned into tracks I really liked and got attached to because of the meanings I projected onto them, so I decided to release them. Claude was used as a tool to sync my music-making with the pace of what I was feeling and wanted to express.

For me, the framing is directing versus executing. AI wrote the JSON code, I composed, arranged, and synthesised the sounds of the whole experiment. Just like an architect doesn’t lay bricks, the credited creator is the one with the vision who makes the decisions. The same critique was levelled at samplers, drum machines, even synthesisers themselves. Every one of those was “cheating” until it wasn’t, and the category “music made with new technology” is just called “music” after enough years. Eventually, my taste is deciding what stays and what goes.

AI isn’t making the music here, it’s writing the code. And methodologically, this doesn’t really change my process. العودة was done without any music theory knowledge, yet, I was able to make melodies with different synthesis techniques. After 30+ iterations per track, I get it right for my ears. By عهد الأصدقاء I had developed the workflow, and I needed to continue العودة’s story, so (Per/Con)formative Linearity served as the transition where I challenged myself into making not just music-adjacent tracks but genre-adjacent ones using the knowledge I developed from making العودة.

I think we have to accept that AI was built on the unethical scraping of data without the creators’ consent, but most western technologies started on unethical footing. Like most other tools, this one began in military applications before finding uses that improved lives rather than ending them. In a time when knowing AI tools is essential to get a job, the argument against using AI shatters. In a world that requires you to have a job to stay alive, being fluent in AI is directly tied to survival. When “israel” and amerikkka use Lavender to determine their targets, the argument against AI being unethical shatters again for the average user. The internet is used for surveillance, but that doesn’t mean we stop using it. Of course, in an ideal world we go back to the land, cultivate, trade for food, and build our own homes, but in a world ruled by giant conglomerates, BlackRock and Vanguard, this isn’t possible. It’s in a way a method to take back power and drive this new technology somewhere we want it to live.

Your music pulls from an unusually broad range of genres—industrial, electro chaabi, Arabic EBM, jungle, hardcore, harsh noise, post-punk, trance and experimental electronics—yet it rarely settles comfortably into any of them. How do you think about genre? Are these styles useful tools and vocabularies, or are they ultimately things you are trying to dismantle and repurpose for your own ends?

I think genres are important to grow communities, but I’m not a trained practitioner of any of these genres. When I first used AI in العودة, as I stated in my article accompanying it, it was to perform audio analysis for the tracks in order to guess the genres of each one from the parent Industrial genre, since I could not put my finger on it. Then, I reversed the process in the next two albums to pick a genre and try to put my touch on it.

For me, genres are vocabularies in the sense that they come out of specific cultures, subcultures, scenes, communities, areas, clubs, … they are family trees with historic lineages. A genre is a cluster of features that have to align perfectly for a track to settle nicely into just one. With there being a number of features to “attain” a certain genre, you have to hit the rhythmic feel (four on the floor for techno, the gallop of jungle, …), use the genre’s sonic markers (909 kick, amen break, …), tempo conventions, …. But also, there’s the self-identification and perception part.

My own relationship to genres, though, is more textual than communal. I’m personally against isolationism as a concept but I am rather an isolationist person by nature, and AI pushed me further into this musical solitude. On the other hand, releasing the music allowed me to reach people I haven’t thought of collaborating with before. So rather than committing to a scene, I pull specific elements. For example, on SPEAK from عهد الأصدقاء, I built a house track but used Gabber’s overdriven kick, so I labelled it Gabberhouse. I’m not trying to dismantle anything on purpose. It would sound like I have an issue with these genres, when really, I’m just letting genres I like get a little taste of my taste.

The title track عهد الأصدقاء (“The Covenant of Friends”) introduces a notion of friendship and solidarity that feels quite different from the anger, danger and confrontation found elsewhere on the album. Is the album ultimately pessimistic, or do you see it as an expression of hope?

Definitely an expression of hope. But pessimism vs. hope is too clean for what the album is doing. The album isn’t optimistic in the sense that things will be okay. It’s hopeful in the sense that resistance is possible and necessary. These are different things and the distinction matters.

The narrative passes through despair without ending in it: memory (PLEASE DON’T FORGET), then speech (SPEAK), those who left (BIBA بيبه), shame at not doing enough (SHAME), the warning of the trap (TRAP), the false equation (Peace=Surrender سلام=استسلام), then DANGER (خطر), DEATH, and BONES (عظام) where we remain in the land even as bones, then the covenant. BONES (عظام) is the turning point, it says presence, not absence. Even our dead are still here. Covenant of Friends arrives after that, it isn’t an ending, it’s a position.

Nabil and Aabla are the only survivors. Their response is to dig each other’s graves and kill each other because without their communities there is nothing left, and that’s alright. The key word is alright. It’s not tragedy, it’s a covenant. Friendship across community lines doesn’t replace community, it only exists because of community. Without the people you come from, you’re not the person who could be in this friendship. If more people were Nabil and Aabla, the resistance would be eternal, no clan would surrender, peace talks would be unthinkable. The story ends with everyone dead because no one surrendered.

The pessimistic version is the opposite: everyone alive, everyone defeated, everyone normalised. “Peace but no one is alive” is the only acceptable peace. The other peace is surrender. The only way forward is to win. Anything else is betrayal of the dead, the bones, and the land. Friendship, community, and memory are not separate themes, they’re the same thing seen from three angles. Friendship is the form, community is the substrate, memory is what binds them. The record opens with please don’t forget because memory is the precondition for everything else. Every track is something that should not be forgotten: the war criminals praised in songs, those who left for the Gulf, the trap, the false peace, the dead, the bones. Memory IS the resistance. Friendship and community are how memory is carried. The covenant is, among other things, a covenant to remember.

العودة was about resistance and survival against “israel”, the will to remain. (Per/Con)formative Linearity asked structural questions: how is meaning made, what is form. This album focuses more on the current situation in Lebanon, fusing the two: structural questions like peace/surrender, memory/forgetting, community/isolation, carried by the directness of العودة. The friendship/community dimension was implicit before. Here it’s the centre, because the people we’re losing are the people we share memory with. (Gianmarco Del Re)