The Dwarfs Of East Agouza - Sasquatch Landslide
Constellation welcomes The Dwarfs Of East Agouza to the label and will release the Cairo-based trio's new album Sasquatch Landslide in early October.
Maurice Louca, Alan Bishop, and Sam Shalabi expand on their telekinetic fusion of North African rhythm, heat-haze improvisation, shaabi rawness, free jazz, and psychedelic groove, following acclaimed albums on Sub Rosa, Akuphone, and Nawa Recordings.
Sasquatch Landslide overspills with the group’s signature trance-inducing explorative energies, anchored by Louca's hypnotic beats and electronics, with Shalabi and Bishop deploying guitar and alto saxophone in a variety of signal-mashing modes. Comprised of seven febrile jams across 42 minutes, this is at once the most focused and twitchiest album in the DOEA discography to date. Recorded by Emanuele Baratto (King Khan, Elder) and mixed by Jace Lasek (Elephant Stone, Sunset Rubdown, The Besnard Lakes), the record will be issued in 180gram vinyl and CD editions, featuring artwork by Mark Sullo.
First single “Neptune Anteater” is a signature example: Shalabi opens with a skittish repeating guitar groove (that draws from his parallel lifelong practice as an improviser on oud) as Louca progressively builds a widescreen 6/8 hand-drum rhythm while oozing bass notes support Shalabi's excursions around the central riff. This is kinetic trance, East Agouza-style.
“High energy psychedelia at its undefinable best.”
THE QUIETUS
“A hypnotic North African stew of pysch grooves, modal riffs, eerie tonal shifts, and euphoric distortion.”
MOJO
“The kind of casually brilliant collaboration that comes along rarely.”
BANDCAMP DAILY
Mitch Hedberg has a great joke about the Sasquatch: “I think Bigfoot is blurry. That’s the problem. It’s not the photographer’s fault. Bigfoot is blurry! And that’s extra scary to me, because there’s a large out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside.”
Sasquatch Landslide. A landslide of hazy configurations. Blurriness, far from a lack of detail, is an embroidering of detail, a horizontal expansion of surface and swarms of light. The name “Sasquatch” derives from the Salish word se'sxac, which means “wild men.” And Sasquatch Landslide is wild. Everything is unravelling. Offset. Décalage. A whole host of slippery tempos and pulses as the organs, guitars and saxophones loiter and lope over a skipping hop of beats, and everything emerges always mid-stream. It is all middle with no halfway point, no dead center, no bullseye. Everything twangs, moans, sweeps, slips, swings, skitters, slides, and grooves out of nowhere. And the almost-human voice with no mother-tongue.
There is something ecstatic (an elatedly miniscule frenzy) going on here but it is pushed beyond the ecstatic: a joyous-grotesque rolling right past trance to dance. Psychedelias appear out of the infra-spaces in between the apparitions and overlapping ‘regimes’ and registers—pushed and squeezed far beyond the recognisable. And these spaces groove joyously hard like some kind of illusive House music, houses completely submerged in molasses. BigFoot-work? (Oh my!) There is not a place to throw your anchor here in the furrowing humidity. That does, and it does, sound like some kind of landslide.
A psychedelic encounter is a brush with the marvel of otherness. The point from which we speak of other, becomes other itself, in an ever-storm of other-production that shreds ideas of knowing and understanding what we think is going on. Time unhinged from the clock. Space unhinged from the frame. An unpinpointing hallucination, a hot get-down, an untethered throw-down of oscillations, fiercely, joyously, exuberantly incomprehensible. Listening to Sasquatch Landslide, a wildly unhinged reverie.
Eric Chenaux and Mariette Cousty, Condat-sur-Ganaveix, February 2025
The Dwarfs Of East Agouza are:
Maurice Louca is an Egyptian musician and composer born and based in Cairo. He is co-founder of the bands Bikya, Alif, and Lekhfa, Louca also lends his sound to numerous other projects, composing for theatre, film, dance and contemporary art. He has released acclaimed work on Sub Rosa, Elephantine, Saet El-Hazz and Northern Spy.
Sam Shalabi is a prolific Egyptian-Canadian composer and improviser living between Montreal and Cairo. He is the founder of Land of Kush and Shalabi Effect, alongside several solo albums and many other group projects. Coming out of punk rock in the late 70s, his work has evolved into a fusion of experimental music that incorporates modern/traditional Arabic, shaabi, noise, and classical music with spoken word, free improvisation and jazz.
Alan Bishop is a founding member of Phoenix/Seattle avant-garde trio Sun City Girls, who have explored the outer reaches of improvisation and composition, from free jazz/post rock psychedelic, and sound collage to outernational Arabic and Asian inspired folk music, for almost three decades. With his As Sublime Frequencies record label, Bishop has released over 100 records, introducing previously ignored musical genres from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
