Hicham Chadly founded Nashazphone in Paris in 2006, inspired by the example of similarly uncompromising underground labels like Chocolate Monk and Siltbreeze. “That idea of a label with a personality was something that I liked very much,” he says.

In its early days, Nashazphone’s focus was on underground noise sounds, lining up early releases from the likes of Birds Of Delay, Sunroof! and Ashtray Navigations. But over the years Nashazphone has widened its remit to explore free improvisation, musique concrète, dark ambient and, increasingly, music from Egypt and Algeria – including electro-shaabi, raï, and the new experimental club sounds percolating through the Cairo underground.

Unglee Izi
“Excerpt”
From MUSIQUE De L’ASMA-CHRONOS De TELEHOR Et SPACE MODULATOR-Plan I, II, III, IV (2024)

Nashazphone’s Hicham Chadly first met Unglee Izi in Paris back in the mid-2000s, when the French musician was making harsh noise and throwing parties on the city’s techno underground. The pair fell back into contact in 2016, and Izi shared some new work – a richly textured computer music influenced by electroacoustic music and Olivier Messiaen.
Musique De L’ASMA Chronos De Telehor Et Space Modulator (Plan I,II,III,IV), released on Nashazphone at the start of 2024, offers up some two hours of deeply atmospheric, cosmic-leaning sound. “Personally it’s one of my favourite albums I’ve put out of the label,” says Chadly. “Next we’ll be doing something bigger – a four or five CD box set.”

EEK
“Part 1”
From Live At The Cairo High Cinema Institute (2013)

Shortly after his return to Cairo, Chadly recalls taking Sun City Girls’ Alan Bishop to see breakout electro-shaabi keyboardist Islam Chipsy and his band EEK play at the city’s High Cinema Institute. Bishop took along a tape recorder, and this is his document of that performance – a rawly recorded but utterly energising collision of shaabi folk music and pounding techno propulsion. “I was really blown away – they played for two hours, nonstop, breakneck,” recalls Chadly. “I called Islam the next day, and said, Can I release this?” Live At The Cairo High Cinema Institute went on to become one of the label’s best sellers, and Nashazphone also released EEK’s official debut studio album, 2015’s Kahraba.

Tomoyuki Aoki & Harutaka Mochizuki
“Nagai Owakare”
From Tomoyuki Aoki & Harutaka Mochizuki (2022)

First released in 2014 but rescued by Nashazphone for reissue in 2022, Tomoyuki Aoki & Harutaka Mochizuki brings together two livewire Japanese musicians: Aoki, guitarist for the outer limits rock group Up-Tight; and Mochizuki, an improvising alto saxophonist. Their collaboration spawns its fair share of fractured, ecstatic freakouts. But the standouts here in fact tend to be the quieter moments: see “Nagai Owakare”, a cold, twilight blues that sees Aoki’s voice shadowed by Mochizuki’s tense, strangulated saxophone.

Sam Shalabi
“Shirk – Part I”
From Shirk (2022)

The Egyptian-Canadian composer Sam Shalabi has played a key role in groups such as the free improvisation quartet Shalabi Effect, Alan Bishop’s Dwarfs Of East Agouza, and the 30-member experimental orchestra Land Of Kush. But his solo album Shirk, released on Nashazphone in 2022, must rank as one of his most unusual and surprising works. Assisted by collaborators Eric Chenaux and Nadah El-Shazly, it manifests as a mutating sound collage that ties together free improvisation, spoken texts, solo oud and Shalabi’s own silky AOR croon.

Smegma/Blood Stereo
“Oh My !!”
From Guff Vout Mulch (2012)

A lost gem from Nashazphone’s early days, Guff Vout Mulch is a meeting of minds between two international freak families – the Californian outsider improv troupe Smegma and Dylan Nyoukis and Karen Constance’s Brighton based noise duo Blood Stereo. An ocean separates them, but a certain affinity is clear – “Oh My !!” is a slurry of vocal gibberish, goopy tape effects and piercing string drones that feels like the product of one single pulsating organism.

Cheba Wahida
“Jrouli Jrouli”
From Jrouli (2022)

Chadly is a fan of raï, a form of Algerian folk music with an urban, gritty edge that made it popular in less salubrious neighbourhoods. Around 2010, he explains, he started hearing a new strain of the music that integrated electronic sounds and Auto-Tune. He was particularly struck by a Cheba Wahida track, with its raw lyrics tackling themes like alcohol abuse and domestic violence. Later, he successfully tracked Wahida down on Facebook and convinced her to let him put out a record. “She was quite a character, a strong personality – like, ‘What do you want?’ For her, the idea of the record industry, putting out vinyl, that was a thing of the past.”

1127 featuring Concrete Shapes
“hyperfals(E)xoteric@iro”
From ض
(2024)

A few years after the Arab Spring, a nascent underground electronic music scene sprung up in Cairo focused around the club night VENT. Homegrown artists like ZULI and PANSTARRS put their own spin on contemporary dancefloor modes – but perhaps the most adventurous of the bunch is 1127. The Cairo producer’s second album for Nashzaphone, ض, is a daring fusion of tensile rave and jungle, rhythmically mangled and dotted with hauntological callbacks to 20th century Egyptian music – quite unlike anything else on the label, or indeed anywhere.

Ramleh
“Natural Causes”
From The Great Unlearning (2019)

One strand running through the Nashazphone catalogue is English industrial music – specifically, that which first surfaced through Gary Mundy’s influential label Broken Flag. Mundy has appeared on Nashazphone both in his solo Kleistwahr guise, and at the helm of his long-running group Ramleh, which over the years has vacillated between bleak power electronics and downbeat avant rock style. 2019’s The Great Unlearning is a fine example of the latter, a sprawling double LP that explores a scorched-earth rock ’n’ roll laced with virulent electronics. “Natural Causes” makes for a suitable mix closer: eight minutes of burned-out psychedelia that feels like huffing on an exhaust pipe.

Read Louis Pattison’s Unlimited Editions article in full in The Wire 488. Wire subscribers can also read the essay online via the digital magazine archive.