Berlin-based Egyptian producer Ahmed Elghazoly aka ZULI, since his early releases gained major global acclaim for his futuristic, kinetic musical diversions. He cut his teeth supplying beats to local rappers back home in Cairo, soon shifting his attention to the city’s burgeoning dance underground, promoting events, DJing prolifically and tirelessly supporting the scene’s most experimental fringe.

Lambda is an album that plays liberally with euphoria, but feels constantly precarious, intrepidly peering out from its tense internal world. Draped in gauzy, granulated textures and woven with enigmatic vocal flourishes from collaborators MICHAELBRAILEY, Coby Sey and Abdullah Miniawy.

“When he’s not straddled by his collaborators through, ZULI is free to make some of his most personal gestures. He fashions a phantasmic, pitch-fluxed robotic croon on ‘Trachea’, curving it around half-speed hip-hop clacks and cinematic drones, then driving it into walls of impermeable noise on ‘The Horn’. And the album’s most revealing moment comes with the short ‘Fahsil Qusseer’, when ZULI recites a poem written by his father. Stretching his voice and a tape-saturated break like elastic, ZULI mimics the emotional push-and-pull of the protagonist, who overcomes their anxiety to escape into the outside world, only to retreat immediately back to the safety of solitude. The track puts the whole of ‘Lambda’ into sharp focus – through the walls of noise and exuberant, intoxicating waves of ambience, ZULI finds solace in limbo between the manic extremes.” (label text)

This album was conceived in Cairo October 2020, finished in Berlin July 2023, released in 2024.  Includes download code.