El Kontessa & Maral Sample Iranian Folk on ‘Butterfly Magic’

Egyptian DJ/producer El Kontessa has teamed up with LA-based artist Maral on ‘Butterfly Magic’, an avant-club track rooted in Iranian heritage.

Maral is known for collecting, dissecting, and reworking sonic fragments from her native Iran. Over the past five years, she has honed her signature folk-club sound, experimental textures and pulverised dub effects woven from her deep archive of Iranian folk, pop, and classical music.

Sidestepping conventional club formulas, the duo lean into deconstruction, anchoring the track with distorted bass kicks, snapping snares, and a deliberately unstable rhythmic core. The production folds in abrasive noise textures, post-punk grit, and chopped vocal shards, threaded with string motifs lifted from Iranian folk and classical traditions. Acoustic hand percussion, such as tombak and daf, adds a layered, driving polyrhythm that refuses to settle.

Metallic clangs, glitch-heavy effects, and white-noise sweeps inject an industrial harshness unmistakably tied to El Kontessa’s sonic signature. Non-Western scales flutter through the arrangement, subtly echoing the track’s title. Midway, the beat drops out entirely, exposing raw vocal fragments and melodic phrases before the track surges back into a chaotic, instrument-thrashing crescendo.

‘Butterfly Magic’ lands as a carefully constructed hybrid, where club music, industrial textures, and Iranian musical traditions coexist without one overpowering the other -somewhere between a sweaty Tehran basement club and a futuristic Berlin warehouse, restless, confrontational, and unafraid to fracture the dancefloor in the process.