Secretly Famous

This is a Western¬er’s image of Cairo and its mythical fleshpots: snake-charmer music for young Euro-clubbers en route to the Sphinx. It does indeed start out like a James Bond adventure with shrill nay, chunky darbuka and a wiry solo on oud. The album has a wide variety of sounds, with traditional Arabic music encountering trap drums and electric bass, and a lot of energy. At its weakest – ‘Jennaty’, featuring Ghalia Benali – it sounds like Tom Tom Club covering ‘Rock the Casbah’; when it works there's a dubby drum‘n’bass quality that suggests Spy From Cairo (aka producer Moreno Visini) has been listening to fellow Italian Gaudi's Nusrat remix project, Dub Qawwali (reviewed in #47), certainly one of the best club albums of the last few years. Sufism does enter the frame with ‘Sufi Disco’, one of the more laid-back cuts: a simple oud riff over a repeated snare and tambourine beat with sustained synth parts.

After the (mostly) urban sophistication of the album, we end up, on ‘Reggada’, with the sound of the Atlas mountains –breathy gasba flute and a singer who has perhaps had one too many pipes of kif –for an excellent moody coda.