Nadah El Shazly says the album is about the idea of being far from home and the things that you miss.Matt Horseman/The Globe and Mail
Outside among lush gardens in Bologna, Italy, on a crisp May evening, Nadah El Shazly moves around the stage with a commanding physical and vocal presence that mimics the tonal movements of her upcoming sophomore record, Laini Tani. The Montreal-via-Cairo electronic musician is playing most of it at each stop on this overseas tour, accompanied by harpist and fellow Quebecer Sarah Pagé and 3Phaz, a DJ and producer also from Cairo.
As smoke fills the scene and the sun dips down behind the trees, a crowd of around 200 people press closer, spellbound by El Shazly as she shifts from airy, dream-like compositions that conjure the feeling of a spiritual experience to songs that pulse with rhythmic, earthbound sensuality.
“This album is actually about the idea of being far from home and the things that you miss,” El Shazly told me over the phone from Cairo in April, noting that the translation to English of the album title is “find me again.” “The things that you know you miss, for instance, like friends and family and places. But also going back to specific rhythms and beats that bring back into you the pace that you know. So it is about, maybe, being in that part of the diaspora.”
”Being very far from places and people that I know made me want to communicate and reach out,” she adds.
El Shazly has lived in Montreal for three and a half years, but was born and raised in Cairo, where her family and many of her friends are (“Everything is here [in Cairo]. So it always feels good, it always feels very heartwarming for me”). She started going back and forth from Cairo to Quebec around 2014, wholly embraced by Montreal’s Land of Kush and the experimental music scene, which eventually provided a major dose of the support she needed to move to the city. Her first album, 2017’s Ahwar, was recorded primarily at Montreal’s revered Hotel2Tango studio – as was Laini Tani – and features a long list of Canadian musicians, including Pagé and violinist, composer, and producer Jesse Zubot.
“It’s an amazing place to write and to make music,” El Shazly says of Montreal. “You have a lot of space, and it’s very calm. But it can also be loud, if you want it to be.”
The record is a fusion of classical Egyptian improvisation and electronic experimentation.Matt Horseman/The Globe and Mail
The intervening years between Ahwar and Laini Tani have proved fruitful. She’s composed film scores during that time and in 2024, she released Pollution Opera, a collaboration of dystopian hellishness with Welsh sound artist Elvin Brandhi.
Her new album is many degrees more intricate, production and composition-wise, than the fragmentary pieces of Ahwar. It trades in fully fleshed-out songs, even frequently drifting into a sort of outsider pop territory, but never sacrifices the inventive spirit that powered her debut. The record’s fusion of classical Egyptian improvisation and electronic experimentation is wholly mesmerizing, its effects providing fluid absorption into El Shazly’s world. And her world on Laini Tani is one of upheaval.
“[The album also deals with] the end of a long relationship,” El Shazly says. “Separation from loved ones. In my circle of friends and musicians in the Arab world, it’s very unstable most of the time. Very unstable situations. Venues are opening and closing all the time. People leave their cities all the time. Things happen, right? Then you try to find ways to make it work. And sometimes it does work and sometimes it doesn’t work. There is uncertainty [on the album] but not because you’re unsure. It’s more what life is giving you.”
That uncertainty or discord is never more present than on Enti Fi Neama, a wall of harsh buzzsaw noise that swells menacingly like an approaching sandstorm. In the garden in Bologna, El Shazly appeared to extend its runtime well beyond what might’ve been considered comfortable, but if one let the experience happen without distraction, it created a hallucinatory feeling of dissolution.
Nadah El Shazly with bandmates Sarah Pagé and 3Phaz.Matt Horseman/The Globe and Mail
In the English translations of Laini Tani’s lyrics, the airy Kaabi Aali has a line that goes: “Come back to me, and mystify me once more.” But hayarni, the word translated as “mystify,” could also be interpreted as “disorganize me and organize me again,” El Shazly says. “In the song, she’s talking to someone she misses very much. Part of love is also this playfulness of teasing each other and pointing at things that are bigger than our human realm.”
Through El Shazly’s otherworldly compositions, the whole of Laini Tani seems to point at things just beyond our grasp; both on record and live, the songs give listeners the impression of slipping apart and then coming together again, the kind of mystical happening that music, as a medium, is uniquely suited for. As El Shazly performs her compositions in the twilit garden – an experience she describes as like flying – she appears comfortable in the midst of metamorphosis.
“Music is amazing because it can allow you to tap into other parts of you,” El Shazly says. “You can dream of it, and you can lose your human form.”
