AKUPHONE

Baskot Lel Baltageyya


Baskot Lel Baltageyya

Growing up in Giza, Adham Zidan hails from a musical family and was surrounded by music from a young age, taking in everything from jazz and classical music to pre-Hamid Arabic pop and movie scores to classic rock, metal and prog. After graduating university, he ran a theater company and worked as an actor. But he pivoted to music full time in the early 2010s, building up his skills as a sound engineer and joining psych group The Invisible Hands.

Baskot finds Zidan working more prominently with keyboards and synthesizers, adding on multiple layers of riffs and melodic refrains over a mix of live and electronic percussion. The songs’ lyrics were written by an elusive poet named Anwar Dabbour, the son of a cabaret organist who grew up eating breakfast with the barflies who would still be lingering at the after-hours venue when the sun came up every morning before school. Zidan and Dabbour first met at a downtown Cairo bar where Dabbour was performing; they hit it off, and when Dabbour sent him a few lines of poetry, Zidan found it impossible to let them go. “I needed more. I had never read anything like it and knew there had to be more,” he recalls.

Zidan convinced Dabbour that they should work together, and over the coming months Dabbour appeared sporadically whenever he felt like it, offering up a song or a few lines. Zidan was eager to include the poet’s voice on Baskot’s debut album, and so he patiently waited, weaving the music together with the words as they came. And in the end it’s Zidan’s fingerprints that you really notice on this project. Baskot is his most ambitious undertaking yet, representing a full showcase of his innovative skills, bold imagination and utterly unique point of view.
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