Band of the week: Telepoetic

A few days back, on January 25, on the way home from the office I got stuck in what felt like an eternal Sisi Day Parade. It was like something out of an absurdist play: characters in red, black, and white costumes, face-painted children wrapped around their parents’ necks. They all seemed to boast crooked smiles while singing along to the layers upon layers of “Tislam al-Ayady,” which was bellowing out of every moving vehicle within radius. The only available air to breath was through a cracked window and gritted teeth. To avoid a brewing panic attack, I put on my headphones and turned to something loud, wordless, and Egyptian: Telepoetic.

The Alexandria-reared band has been around since 2006, and were of the first to garner a big following with an experimental, electronica and post-rock blend. The trio is mostly an instrumental act, and it consists of Amir Rizk on drums and pads, Mohamed Desouky on bass guitar, and Ahmed Saleh manning the electronics, keys and electric guitar. Maybe it’s because they’re from Alex, which has always been poetic, or maybe it’s because their sound is better than most locals in their category, but where Telepoetic succeed is through their particular ability to evoke metaphysical journeying. At the same time, their sound isn’t too far out there: the songs have a good groove that invites you into a sonic world that you might not want to leave again for a while. This may ring particularly true if your surroundings involve camouflaged children parading around to military-lovin’ Mustafa Kamel songs on the anniversary of a misplaced revolution.

For quite a while now, I thought Telepoetic was just something I listened to when alone, on my headphones, drowning out background and mindless thoughts. But after going to one of their shows a couple weeks ago at Falaki Theater, I realized there’s actually a lot more to the band than I had originally thought. Performing songs from their debut LP, “Ensehab,” which they released in November 2013, the trio guided us through a post-rock, instrumental set that drew on various left-field categories including dub, ambient, electronica and rock. Their music, whether you’re seated or standing, has a pulse: I can tap my foot to it, and sway my head — it’s a pulse that, with few exceptions, is regular and evenly spaced in time — and it’s within these spaces that we, the listeners, can expect certain events at particular points in the song.

… Sitting in that dimly lit auditorium, I recognized a few familiar faces who were active in the January 25 2011 (revolution). They, like me, sat in the plush theater chairs tapping their feet and bobbing their heads while falling into the captivating audiovisual display projected onto a stage installation as Rizk kicked the drums, Desouky flicked the bass, and Saleh swayed between the electric guitar and keys. And right about the time they started performing “Unicorn,” I realized that writing about Telepoetic’s sound is kind of like dancing to graffiti. It’s possible, but like their name suggests, their sound is poetry, and thus it’s personal, even when you are listening to it collectively. Like all good poets, Telepoetic say the unsayable.