A wailing, almost longing voice spills through my headphones. I have listened to this song religiously for days. Now, in her just-released music video for the title track of her new album Laini Tani, I watch snippets from Nadah El Shazly – singer, composer, producer, actress – performing it. After releasing her first album, Ahwar (2017), she toured extensively and worked on projects like the collaborative experimental noise album Pollution Opera (2024). Her sound has changed, evolved, grown.
“I didn’t study music and I am not from a musical family,” Nadah El Shazly, who studied and worked as a psychologist, says. Her first album was an experiment in translating classical Arabic music into today’s sounds. “My first album was looking at music like paintings. With this one, I was exploring what music means to me, what language I should or even can sing in, and what letters and words mean.”
Roots in Cairo
Nadah El Shazly is deeply rooted in Cairo’s vibrant and manifold music scene and works on a very collaborative basis. “I grew up listening to so much different music. You were exposed to different music in the same venues. The more I make music, the more I understand my sound. I love to explore. I love the playfulness,” she says. For the collaboration album Pollution Opera, El Shazly worked with the Welsh producer Elvin Brandhi.
Photo by Omar Sha3
“I met him in Cairo. He was there for a show. It was great to finally meet. We knew of each other before, and we just started recording. I was in a Misfit Cover Band, and we were both very influenced by metal. There is a big metal scene in Cairo. We worked on this project within different residencies for two years.”
For Laini Tani she worked with 3Phaz as her co-producer and Sarah Pagé as her harpist: “3Phaz and I were both in the underground music scene in Cairo, it feels like we grew up together, with the same music. Through my manager, I got put in touch with Sarah. We played together once, and it felt like we had played together a long time. He makes heavy electronica beats, and it has a harshness. The harp is softer. Of course, the harp is not just fragile, and obviously the beats can be soft too, but these two musicians with very different sounds got together, and the two sounds move between soft and heavy. It inspired me in my writing. I got more ideas.” Nadah El Shazly was playing so much, she says, that more songs evolved. Songs closer to herself:
“I felt more like telling a narrative in ‘Laini Tani’. A big difference was also that I wrote it away from home.”
Writing Home
Now living in Canada, Nadah El Shazly took inspiration from being new to a place, missing and longing for the mundane familiar, and feeling like being on the outside of something: “I moved because I was travelling a lot and as long as there is a stage, there is your home. I am happy about the move because I get to see myself in different contexts. I wanted to write about what I miss in Cairo. The people, places, the inside jokes, the sun, the small day-to-day. The things you don’t realise that matter till they’re gone.”
Photo by Omar Sha3
“When the photographer for the album cover suggested shooting at the Dead Sea, it resonated with me. The feeling of being a stranger in this world, like living in the Dead Sea. Even though it is an unlivable place.” The light reflecting in the water has turned gold on her skin. The dreamy look in her and the vibrant gold do seem like a stranger to the dark blue of the water, but she does not look lost, rather at home in the playfulness and variety of her sound and influences.
My last question for her might have been the hardest one. Especially in the current hostile political world climate, do you feel a responsibility, as an artist, to address political or social issues in your work?
“I cannot not be a political artist. I know where I come from. It’s evident in the choices I make, what languages I sing and write in, and what instruments I use. I took the time to learn arab musical instruments. I am political in choosing which venue I go to and which not, what people I work with and who I don’t work with. Music is not escapism, it is political.”
The video for “Laini Tani” ends with rattling percussion, the drummer Patrick Graham and Nadah El Shazly on stage flooded in red and green flashes. It is a sound that is not just an exploration of different genres but a door opener for a new way of defining genre altogether.
Laini Tani by Nadah El Shazly is out now via One Little Independent Records. You can stay up to date with the artist by following her on Instagram or her website.