Band of the week: Cellar Door

It’s not easy to create a resounding identity in experimental electronic music, particularly since the genre’s producers seem constantly torn between creating and owning a certain sound, and developing new ones.

Yet somehow, out of nowhere, 21-year-old producer and DJ Amr Alamy came onto the scene in 2013 with one of the most luscious new sounds, fueled by adventurous sampling, diverse noise elements and melodic bass lines under the moniker Cellar Door.

Although Alamy has been releasing tracks on SoundCloud since 2012, it was his contributions to ReTune Studio’s compilation album that properly introduced him to the indie music landscape with tracks like “Rich in Love” and “I Was Blind Now I See.”

Listening to Cellar Door at home alone, through proper headphones, is a certain trip. But the young producer’s music is an entirely different experience live. While recently attending his show at 100Copies in downtown Cairo, I realized my body was twitching and moving minimally yet fluidly in very different ways from my normal electronic dance music motions.

Fragmented and ambitious, Alamy’s music draws from various types of sound including glitches, white noise, ambient samples and sparse and sultry vocals that coil suggestively between spacey synthesizers.

In his track “Melancholia,” Alamy uses an Erykah Badu sample for the “I’m an orange moon” vocal line, which moves in sensuous fractured loops around the string sounds of the synthesizer, resulting in an ethereal, cloudlike sound. On top of this, broken “hums” from Badu’s lyrics ominously phase in and out against a backdrop of ambient drones and beautifully timed doses of bass.

Listening to his live set made it clear to me just how remarkable Alamy’s recording and producing abilities are. As it sounds and seems, he produces each track with the future joy of twisting and turning knobs in mind: Fading, chopping and looping layers over and over until his audiences are subdued, yet dutifully dancing and swaying with closed eyes and wobbling heads.

The darkness of the room, in which there was no visual component apart from the performer, allowed our senses to be entirely dominated by the soundscape — the only intrusion being when the dull spotlight that shined on Alamy occasionally switched between red, green, blue and yellow.  

The other interesting aspect of Alamy’s live shows is his uncanny ability to play across a wide spectrum of BPM (beats per minute), which seems to drift anachronistically from BPMs as low as 115 up to 144 — most DJs in Egypt remain in the safe zone of 130-155. In the closing minutes of his set, Alamy was turning the 12 knobs of the AKAI MPD32 controller so rapidly that his hands appeared to blur as he created sound layers using a unique sonic method that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

It’s almost as though he isolates and elongates each note of the melody by slowing it down, to pile particles and particles of sound on top of each other like a sand castle constructed only for the pleasure of watching it deconstruct with each crashing wave.

While some people might call Alamy’s music dark, I hear it as intellectual techno with just the right amount of emotional texturing to make it relatable. In his track “Rich on Love,” we hear an almost meditative swirling of synthesizers, ethereal vocals and a heartbeat-like bass line. It just might point to the future of abstract electronic dance music in Egypt.