The music of The Dwarf of East Agouza sounds like a lot of things happening at once—more things than you’d expect from a three-piece. There are instrumental wails and squalls, bits of melody careen into the middle distance, an electronic soup bubbles away, and a thick buzz underpins everything. It sounds like it could be messy or undisciplined, but it’s not. It’s more like the semi-organised bustle of a busy souk, with its tension between chaos and order, where every sound has its meaning and its place.
You’d expect nothing less from this trio. Egyptian-Canadian musician Sam Shalabi, whose main duty here is the electric guitar, is a founder member of experimental rockers Shalabi Effect and the director of avant-orchestral ensemble Land of Kush. He also moonlights in Swamp Circuit, Detention, Nutsak and Moose Terrific. Alto saxophonist Alan Bishop is best known as a mainstay of adored American experimentalists Sun City Girls, where his duties included bass guitar and vocals. Maurice Louca (keys, beats and electronics) is one-third of Egyptian alt-pop group Lekhfa, as well as holding down a solo career that draws on African and Yemeni music and free jazz.
Those pedigrees give you some idea of the range and style on show on Sasquatch Landslide. Opener Swollen Thankles acts like a kind of musical welcome mat, its brief runtime encompassing all the squeals and burbles, all the slightly crazed Afro-psych, that the rest of the album will explore in ever more detail. Saber Tooth Millipede works from a base of pinging percussion, delighting in highly complex rhythmic and melodic ideas. The guitars are frazzled and the beats sandblasted. The result is a kind of abstract musical pointilism.
Double Mothers focuses on the drone, furnishing it with a hard-edged, heat-honed electric guitar, before the piece breaks down into a vehicle for Bishop’s enigmatic free jazz sax. Titular has a satisfying, swift-fingered guitar part that sounds like a brisk and expert deconstruction of desert blues. Louca’s clipped beats contrast neatly with Shalabi’s guitar on Neptune Anteater, the whole thing sounding like a North African variant of Trout Mask Replica-era Magic Band.
But it’s on the album’s lengthy last two tracks that things get really weird and wonderful. A Body to Match unfolds over ten minutes, trading off folky and almost-familiar guitar lines with cavernous electronic soundscapes and single, drawn-out sax notes. It shares similar proportions with certain varieties of space-rock, but the ingredients are notably terrestrial, drawn from the heat of the earth and from shared musical invention. Closer Goldfish Molasses embarks on a wild trip from an initially minimal groove, taking in Bishop’s treated vocal warbles. It’s Sasquatch Landslide’s quietest moment, but also its weirdest, a characteristically outlandish conclusion from this boundary-pushing, mind-bending trio.
Sasquatch Landslide (October 3rd, 2025) Constellation Records