Label: Holidays Records – HOL142
Format: Vinyl, LP, Remastered
Country: UK
Released: 2025
Genre: Classical, Folk, World, & Country
Style: Experimental, Contemporary, Ambient
Haunting, entranced, ghosts-in-the-groove debut LP from Egyptian musician Nancy Mounir - a past-life communion between the present day and old-world allure of Arabic classical music.
In a disorientating whirlwind of subtly augmented collages, Mounir holds a seance with the dead, unearthing the rich vain of 20th century archival recordings from vast world of Arabic classical music and gently embellishing them with her own compositions. Mounir’s own knowledge of the traditional instruments, timbres, tonalities and modalities present within the historic recordings selected here allows her to interact with the past in a surprisingly seamless way. It’s this sleight of hand that makes it hard to tell where the past ends and today begins, with Mounir’s interjections eliciting elegant melodies previously hidden and intensifying the emotion that’s otherwise lost in the dust. This time-travelling interaction between past and present is surely no easy feat, and it’s remarkable that this didn’t wash out as a daubist-like mishmash - we’re usually quite happy when people just leave old recordings alone - yet there’s richly cinematic, enticing grace to these recordings that are irresistible and resultantly worth well more than the sum of their parts. Stunner! (Mint / New - with booklet).
Nancy Mounir’s debut album, Nozhet El Nofous, is a remarkable communion with ghosts. Moody, hypnotic, and sneakily catchy, the album—whose title means “Promenade of the Souls'' in Arabic—explores microtonality, non-metered rhythms, and bold vulnerability through a musical dialogue between Mounir’s own arrangements and the sounds of archival recordings of once-famed singers from Egypt at the turn of the 20th century. Adding her own ambient arrangements over voices haunted with passion and desire as she creates a sound that is warmly familiar but utterly new.
On the album, Mounir slips into the gaps left by the lost frequencies of the aging recordings, finding space for counterpoint and harmony in a traditional sound built on monophony. Elegant melodies unfold in measured gestures as Mounir—who plays most of the instruments herself —revels in the plaintive intonations and brash lyrics of the departed singers. With layers enmeshed together, it’s at times hard to pin down when the past ends and the present begins, but beneath it all is a liberating attitude of defiance that feels timeless.
Nozhet El Nofous is brilliant in the way it explores the techniques and perspectives of a more freewheeling time period in Arabic music, before Arabic maqam (modal systems) and other musical foundations were standardized by the Middle East’s cultural power brokers in the early 1930s. As she summons a rich, atmospheric landscape of tone and texture, Mounir engages an older generation of musical rebels in a creative dialogue across time and space—and the results are stunning in their ambition and beauty.
Tracklist
1 Taala Ya Shater
2 Khafif Khafif
3 Matkhafsh Alayya
4 Baad El Esha
B5 Wallah Testahel Ya Albi
B6 Ya Einak Ya Gabayrak
B7 Ana Bas Saktalak
B8 Gannentini
