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FHMY/AQL - I Keep On Not Dying (Memphis Records)

28 January 2025

There is an interesting point to be found in the bio that accompanies this new collaboration between these two Egyptian post-rock/shoegazers, something I have thought about a lot over the years. The fact that they cite the likes of Dostoevsky and Franz Kafka, Tarkovsky and Albert Camus as their influences reminds us that inspiration can be found anywhere, and especially for songwriters, it is certainly not limited to the sphere of music.

After all, most bands only list other artists as influences because that is what they hope they sound like. By listing authors and philosophers, we get closer to a band’s approach to music-making rather than just what they hope to copy.

“I Keep on Not Dying,” itself an interesting phrase and perhaps a good place to begin a discussion on mortality, is a gorgeous wave of untethered and drifting guitars, a mercurial blend of soft lysergic embrace and sharp-edged abrasiveness that ebb and flow between extreme, between the ambient and the hard-edged, lush soundscaping and angular acoustics, between structure and dreamscape.

If there is a musical state that you could term noisy-ambient, this would fit into that space, not just a song that moves between those two extremes but a sound that often exists in both opposing states simultaneously. Quantum shoegaze?

It also speaks to the obsessive nature of creativity, the fact that the artistic drive never really goes away, that in this sense, the artist is unable to die. And with music this intriguing, this poignant, this easily able to spark artistic debate, let’s hope that FHMY and AQL ‘s artistic spark keeps on “not dying” for a very very long time to come.

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