It was hard to process what happened during Nadah El Shazly's set. Describing how it was doesn't come close to helping understand its beautiful strangeness. Backed by a harpist feeding the instrument through an abundance of distortion pedals and preloaded experimental electronic noises played on a laptop, Nadah El Shazly passionately sang songs of grief, love, violence and hope in Arabic to a heartbreakingly small crowd. The atonal set confused a number of middle-aged casual festival goers, who periodically got up from their lawn chairs and left to find music a little more straightforward in its presentation.
The Cairo-based composer and producer played a slow and methodical set. No clear song structure to the stripped-back performance meant the main focus was on her voice. She stretched her powerful vocals to the limit, often bending over and kneeling at the song's most heartfelt moments and, at one point, dropping the microphone altogether to let her voice resonate unplugged through the festival grounds, with backing beats that sounded like a whale underwater and a harp that at some points sounded like a microwaved theremin. It was amazing to see a true sonic voyager stretching their creative limit.