Abdullah Miniawy - Nigma Enigma (2024)

Enter the straight bridge. Unlearn what you have learnt through the years in the west. Music is against existence. It has a glory power upon you.
It makes you lose yourself, as if someone is hammering slightly through your flesh to outside.

Enter the straight bridge, where I wait for you in the Middleway, bending to a golden table. You are welcome and blessed to read with your heart and browse in the ethereal lost dictionaries. We live as we meant to be; collectively eternal—searching for a folder of unwritten evidence. But do words count after suffering? Religions expire. Sound is the medium. Positive-Dose in order to search for them.

Enter the straight bridge. I could describe to you the fine I paid for love to the whole. They stood by my back; I felt the heat through their breaths. Then I ran away out of the studio in tremendous fear. If you found this record, be aware that I failed to translate what I have envisioned of the other worlds—how close they are to hells or heavens in many historical books. Hear the bleeding demons in 3 characters in each audio file: the call, the voice, and landscapes.

My solo work is an escape of freedom. It’s the first time in my career, after years of collaboration with many artists and compromising what I feared to share. I came out with the first tools I used before working with others to put together a record inspired from nothingness with what I have next to me spontaneously, raw but direct as a child’s first words. A call to play all roles at once. A raw state of improvisation. I found salvation in the first tools I used: nature, voice and software.

Nigma means a star in Egyptian dialect—written like this نجمة . Enigma is the dilemma of the dialogue. It is research through voice, modulars, radio station samples, and walks at lonely nights in Paris that brought me to question my art again. The work envisions an Opera for Muslims, falling in untouched definitions such as Paradise and Inferno, which cross and match with Coptic culture, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and The Divine Comedy, where I stare at Dante handing me with his popped eyes a new cape, this time in white.