24 Ribs ٢٤ ضُلع by Los Panteros

Los Panteros is the offspring of composer/bassist Tony Elieh and songwriter/vocalist Aya Metwalli. It was born within the framework of Irtijal music festival where the duet was commissioned to play an improv that was filmed and streamed during the 2020’s edition. The project was developed during a residency within the framework of the Phonetics festival in St. Denis in France, then finalized and debuted at Morphine Raum in Berlin after the project was granted the Musikfonds e.V. by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media (BKM). Metwalli is essentially a melodist who grew up listening to and being trained to sing a vast repertoire of classical Egyptian music. When she bloomed and expanded her sound palette, she began interweaving the in-betweens of the microtones of Arabic scales and modes with amplification and audio processing, and with rough electronic bursts of deep, rumbling frequencies. Elieh has a solid curriculum of tight, heavy, melodic bass lines, growing outward from his early career cofounded Scrambled Eggs - one of the most prominent punk bands in Lebanon. He then further explored his instrument into dense textures and complete deconstruction of tune with the help of electronics. Joining forces, they play a set of bass, voice and electronics that crochets melody, atonal textures, rhythm and the dilution of time signatures.

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As an album, 24 Ribs is a synthesis of Elieh’s ongoing combination of bass and electronics along with Metwalli’s vocal experiments departing from the comfort of established melodic structures. Al Waysel, roughly translated as a sort of threatening suffering and doom, begins with a brooding propulsion before Metwalli’s voice swirls into and out of recognition, drowning in bouts of Elieh’s noise and distortion. Ya Tayren Tayer references a piece of Palestinian oral history and folklore, and starts with Elieh on bass, filtered through a cloud of distortion, and smoked in crunching electronic textures. Metwalli’s voice instead comes through clear, pristine and melodic, playing with and at times against Elieh’s looping and reverberating bass, sitting just under a bed of electronics, as the layers of Metwalli’s voice stack upon each other in a panning polyvocal tapestry. Zalimou el 7osni—a nod to the song by Oum Kalthoum—launches with contrasting forces of jingling bells and ringing high-frequency electronics above a grumbling drone before Metwalli’s voice enters and dialogues with strings seemingly tucked a room or two away. The conversation between these textures, at times melodic and synchronous, and at other points not, weaves in and out of focus, throughout the album. There is a strong duality at play between the hypnotic looping rhythm of the bass and the ability of Metwalli to float in clean or arrive above the noise chopped, rusty and dirty.

Recorded in Berlin, at Rabih Beaini’s Morphine Raum, 24 Ribs is the product of an intensive period of improvisation and composition, dating back to 2022, and takes its name from an old Egyptian proverb: “if you take one of my ribs, I’ll grow 24 more”. This proverb, which probably refers to Genesis, becomes a resilient declaration. By the time the closing title track wraps with nearly eight minutes of arhythmic warbling, accompanied by indiscernible electronic whirling and waning, and Metwalli’s ever present spatial haunting, you’ve almost forgotten what constitutes this sonic fabric in which you’re enveloped—or where those sounds came from. And that is exactly the moment that the real resonance of the two seems to reveal itself in a sort of six-minute rhythmic bliss, filtered through psychedelic layering and looping. Although coming from different times, places and spaces, Elieh and Metwalli have built an album on a solid confluence of what is essentially the sonic equivalent of experimental film’s in-camera editing.

–The mountain moves–

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