Up next on Whities is a new release from Carl Gari & Abdullah Miniawy.

Carl Gari is a trio of German musicians made up of Jonas Yamer, Till Funke, and Jonas Friedlich. Abdullah Miniawy is an Egyptian musician and poet, currently based in France. They began collaborating in 2016, delivering Darraje, a four-track EP via Trilogy Tapes that resulted from a spontaneous studio session together in Cairo.

“We met Abdullah on our first day in Cairo and got along with him immediately. So we spent our whole time there together in the studio—we didn’t even go to see the pyramids—recording the four tracks that came out one year later as our Darraje EP on The Trilogy Tapes,” Jonas Yamer recalls.

After that, they became best friends and their shared artistic vision “grew so important to us that we could overcome all bureaucratic and financial difficulties that resulted from creating and recording new music together between Cairo and Munich,” Yamer explains. As the Al-Sisi regime intensified the oppression on artists that speak out freely against the government and religion, Miniawy was forced to leave Egypt, and, after months of uncertainty, he finally obtained some kind of legal status in France.

Since then, they’ve been operating between Paris and Munich, but they record everything in a remote house in the Bavarian Forest, in a little town called Neunburg vorm Wald.

The Act of Falling from the 8th Floor is described as “a music clash between Cairo and Munich, North Africa and Western Europe.” It’s focused around the poem in “B’aj بعاج” that forms the lyrical centrepiece of the record. In this song, Abdullah is the protagonist, jumping from the 8th floor of a building in Cairo. While falling he describes a unique scene happening on every balcony, painting a dark picture of Egyptian society. Carl Gari produced and mixed the record, providing a melancholic backbone for Abdullah’s lyrics and melodies.

“I think this whole story of how we found each other and fought for doing our thing together is an authentic example of intercultural communication simply because it was never about intercultural communication or some kind of cheesy fusion,” Yamer adds. “We are certainly not your world musicians. Our project is a living proof that artistic passion cannot merely address the absurdities of modern politics but actually overcome them.”

Earlier this year, Whities released works from Bambounou, Rupert Clervaux, and Leif, and has previously put out EPs from Avalon Emerson, Lanark Artefax, and more.

The Act of Falling from the 8th Floor lands on September 6. Meanwhile, A full stream of the EP is available HERE, via Bandcamp.

Tracklisting

A1 / 1. Zawaj زواج
A2 / 2. A’laj علاج
A3 / 3. Zyaj زياج
B1 / 4. Haj حاج
B2 / 5. B’aj بعاج
B3 / 6. Hela هيلا