Bes

Formed in 2012, the trio who make up the Dwarfs found themselves living in the same apartment building in Cairo's Agouza district. It's simple enough to describe the ingredients at work on this extraordinary debut record. Cairo native Maurice Louca contributes North African-tinged percussion loops and shimmering synths; Sam Shalabi adds avant-garde free-jazz guitar, and Alan Bishop, the best known of the three as the co-founder of the label Sublime Frequencies and a former member of experimental rock band Sun City Girls, provides pulsing Krautrock-style bass.

It's less easy to convey the collective impact of their improvisational explorations, recorded during a three-day studio session in 2014, because there are few conventional reference points to which one can usefully allude. An Arabic equivalent of Africa Express’ take on Terry Riley's In C, with a touch of Cairo-tronics, inspired by Konono No 1, might be as good a description as you can get – only far, far weirder. Hints of Ethio-jazz, Gnawa trance and various other tribal rhythms of indeterminate parentage are swathed in hypnotic bleeps and washes of hallucinogenic noise. Strange, but compellingly so.