The Dwarfs Of East Agouza
Sasquatch Landslide

"Experimental fury spring-loaded with a disorienting, unpredictable energy—left-field guitar music that practically launches itself at you." - Bandcamp (Album of the Day) 

"Time inside these tracks remains flexible: concise without feeling compressed, letting heavier moments unfold gradually. The winding guitar lines deepen the dreamlike mood. With Sasquatch Landslide, the band condenses improvisation into a compact space, keeping their energy open and inventive." - The Quietus

“The music of The Dwarfs of East Agouza is disjointed, anarchic, awkward, fluid, pulverized, repetitive, unruly, fragmented, at times joyful, and always slightly out of focus. Like an art brut collection of raw sound, magnificently orchestrated by Maurice Louca, Alan Bishop, and Sam Shalabi — long-time heralds of the strange and the sublime.” - The New Noise

"A psychedelic, motorik jam, with a palette made up of North African and Middle Eastern instruments, this is wonderful stuff." - Loud & Quiet

"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." - Klof Mag

“‘Swollen Thankles’ is a short introductory number with Terry Riley-type swirls and drones, leading on to the longer ritualistic ‘Saber Tooth Millipede’, with its duelling acoustic-electric microtonal guitar-scratches, sinuous bassline and hand drums. As ‘Double Mothers’ introduces disobedient electronic beats and distant saxophone, there’s a general feeling of a loose free improv session. ‘Neptune Anteater’ is more focussed and concentrated, making dynamic progressions with wild percussion…” - Songlines

 “Trying to make sense of The Dwarfs Of East Agouza is like trying to unpick life’s complexities. Just don’t do it. Ride it out and see what shakes out… the soundtrack for the nomadic herdsmen.” - Sun13

 “Time itself bends and stretches, taking on an almost elastic quality as the threads unravel to reveal new layers and dimensions. One can feel the instrumentation expanding outwards into infinity… ” - Aural Aggravation

"Sasquatch Landslide doesn't demand attention; it dissolves it. It doesn't lead, it loops. It doesn't resolve, it jumbles and multiplies threads. As if the Cairo trio were trying to push the boundaries of perception: blurring the rhythm, stretching the groove, suffocating the midrange until the very point of reference disappears." - Anxious Musick Magazine

“A dreamlike sequence of minimal-ambient-psychedelic refractions and wild improvisation — seductive, unhinged, and magnetic… a marvelous record — dynamic, exploratory, and deeply rooted in The Dwarfs Of East Agouza’s singular universe.” - Blow Up 8.5/10

Pick a small spot (a point) in front of you (a small knot of wood, a dog down the way). And tightly focus on this spot. And now slowly unfocus your gaze. Widen your gaze. Pan out without moving your eyes. Take it all in. 

A smeared and pixelated surface, swelling of contour and light. (Monet’s seepages of light, Altman’s overlapping nomadic dialogue.) Once you have unfocused with little to no center of attention, slowly close your eyes. And please feel very free to notice the light. All of the light that your eyes knocked back as you dilated your focal point. This exercise can be repeated a few times. Unfocusing does not always come easily. And it is probably best to not put too much effort into it. Best to not employ too much pressure.

And we will not put too much pressure on this exercise to help us explain away the humidly, saturatedly psychedelic canopy of moan-‘n-twang and slackelastic-groove of The Dwarfs Of East Agouza’s Sasquatch Landslide.

Mitch Hedberg has a great joke about the Sasquatch: “I think Bigfoot is blurry. That’s the problem. It’s not the photographer’s fault. Bigfoot is blurry! And that’s extra scary to me, because there’s a large out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside.”

 Sasquatch Landslide. A landslide of hazy configurations. Blurriness, far from a lack of detail, is an embroidering of detail, a horizontal expansion of surface and swarms of light. The name “Sasquatch” derives from the Salish word se'sxac, which means “wild men.” And Sasquatch Landslide is wild. Everything is unravelling. Offset. Décalage. A whole host of slippery tempos and pulses as the organs, guitars and saxophones loiter and lope over a skipping hop of beats, and everything emerges always mid-stream. It is all middle with no halfway point, no dead center, no bullseye. Everything twangs, moans, sweeps, slips, swings, skitters, slides, and grooves out of nowhere. And the almost-human voice with no mother-tongue.

There is something ecstatic (an elatedly miniscule frenzy) going on here but it is pushed beyond the ecstatic: a joyous-grotesque rolling right past trance to dance. Psychedelias appear out of the infra-spaces in between the apparitions and overlapping ‘regimes’ and registers—pushed and squeezed far beyond the recognizable. And these spaces groove joyously hard like some kind of illusive House music, houses completely submerged in molasses. BigFoot-work? (Oh my!) There is not a place to throw your anchor here in the furrowing humidity. That does, and it does, sound like some kind of landslide.

A psychedelic encounter is a brush with the marvel of otherness. The point from which we speak of other, becomes other itself, in an ever-storm of other-production that shreds ideas of knowing and understanding what we think is going on. Time unhinged from the clock. Space unhinged from the frame. An unpinpointing hallucination, a hot get-down, an untethered throw-down of oscillations, fiercely, joyously, exuberantly incomprehensible. Listening to Sasquatch Landslide, a wildly unhinged reverie.

Eric Chenaux and Mariette Cousty
Condat-sur-Ganaveix, February 2025

PACKAGING NOTES

CREDITS