Five albums in and Saint Abdullah and Eomac are still refusing to sit still. This is their most chaotic and rewarding record yet.
The title came from a conversation in a Paris taxi. That seems about right for a record that refuses any fixed address, genre, or stable ground to stand on.
When The Sandbox Has No Edge is the fifth collaboration between Mohammad Mehrabani (Saint Abdullah) and Ian McDonnell (Eomac), and the back catalogue, Patience of a Traitor, Chasing Stateless, Light Meteors Crashing Around You Will Not Confuse You, is already good evidence that these two do not make comfortable music. This one is their most ambitious and their most abrasive. The sketches came from Mehrabani working alone in his daughter’s bedroom in London on two Roland SP-404 samplers, pulling records from charity shops and market stalls across the UK. McDonnell took those fragments to Wicklow and shaped them into something else entirely.
What comes out the other end is genuinely hard to categorise. The album cycles through harsh noise, footwork, dub, breakcore, neo-classical and dreamy techno with no apparent anxiety about the transitions. Gusgazzler and Ten Inch Reverb are grinding and relentless. Home Away From Funeral Home swings between chamber music and juke. Closer A Good Day To Blast Off drifts out on something close to warmth, which feels almost earned. The 17 tracks rarely outstay their welcome and some of the most striking moments are the shortest ones.
The guest list is doing real work. Che Chen’s guitar on Whiff Tackle is genuinely beautiful, a soulful coda that arrives out of nowhere and stays with you. Armand Hammer (billy woods and ELUCID) show up on As We Are with verses that address capitalism and colonial violence without straining for impact. Abbas Zahedi’s contribution to Cyphers Become Sifr, on phone addiction and language and the slippage between the two, is the one track that feels like a genuine crossover possibility, the most playable thing either artist has made. Seraphim’s presence runs throughout, texturing and unsettling.
Elham Goodarzi’s artwork deserves mention: manipulated archival photographs of Middle Eastern architecture reworked into something that feels simultaneously historical and fractured. The record’s preoccupations with diaspora, displacement and borders are not incidental. Mehrabani made this while living away from the country his family left, and the Iranian presence across the record sits heavy against a year of escalating conflict. None of this is laboured or didactic. It’s just there, in the grain of it.
Boomkat called it their “weightiest, most chaotic set yet.” That’s accurate. It’s also their most generous, in the range of what it lets in.
When The Sandbox Has No Edge is available now via Bandcamp.
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