JOMANIA Interplays Jungle, Glitch & Conflict in 'Archetype Vol. 1' EP

In the deepest, darkest pockets of Egypt’s dissonant musical landscape, there exists a new generation of experimentalists that are pushing the parameters of music. One force leading the charge is Cairo-based label, MOSHTRQ, which has just released Archetype Vol. 1, the debut EP from JOMANIA. 

Having turned heads with her track, ‘DEFECTIVE//REPLICA’, the Libyan audiovisual artist and producer has channeled complex philosophical concepts - specifically Jungian archetypes, subconscious tension and internal conflict - into experimental audio. Her unique sonic palette is built from survival and horror game sounds, fused with fragmented vocal textures that feel both unsettling and strangely familiar.

As a self-anointed frequencies vanguard and noise phantomist, she masterfully fuses the intensity of jungle and breakcore rhythms with intricate layers of glitch, noise and ethereal ambient textures. Shaping distortions and corrupted structures into monolithic, complex audio forms, her precise sound design acts like a digital chisel carving macabre sonic sculptures. While the EP shows her handle of sound processing to be intentional and precise, the ambient elements carry a sense of deep, wandering introspection through its layers of unconventional sound.

The album wastes no time in diving into the dark corners of JOMANIA’s mind, with its opening statement, ‘PROLOGUE’, coming as a powerful ambient descent into a psychological nebula. Built on low-frequency drones and metallic resonances, the track avoids rhythm to focus on an escalating sonic tension built on a type of digital decay. 

However, ‘VIDEOTAPE LOOPCCXII’ abruptly shatters that atmosphere with a burst of frantic, chaotic energy. She uses rapid breakcore and jungle tempos, but the rhythm is constantly fractured by glitch and distortion. The track's central feature is a ghostly vocal sample which is chopped, degraded and looped to create a sort of obsessive, maddening narrative. The result is a psycho-acoustic collision that merges intense dance momentum with noise aesthetics, symbolising the mind's internal conflict.

‘HALLWAY’ then shifts the focus back to a more suspenseful environment. While retaining ambient textures, it introduces a subtle, pulsing industrial rhythm and deep, echoing percussion. A persistent rumble and a distant, metallic clang further translate the concept of subconscious tension into a tightly-wound cinematic soundscape that feels both empty and suffocatingly crowded.

Positioned at the album's midpoint, the nine-minute-plus ‘VALVARIAN//JOURNEY’ showcases JOMANIA at her technical best. By far the most cinematic and atmospheric piece on the album, it whistles and warbles, roars and rumbles through an ebb and flow of dark, bassy vibrations that tingle with static and harmonise with swampy domineering vocal samples.  

The slow, crushing force of ‘DORMIN’ reroutes the album back to an industrial ambient mood, constructed with from deep, throbbing bass and slowed-down, heavy drum hits that at times feel like a distant demolition, as metallic scraping and static are shaped into a cohesive yet agonising structure. 

The journey culminates with ‘EPILOGUE’, which acts as the mirror image of the album's opener. It returns to a wide, ethereal, ambient soundscape that pulls together the distortions and noise into a smooth, purring drone. The chaos is gone, replaced by a lingering sense of finality and calm - a moment of catharsis in the intensity of internal conflict defined by the preceding tracks.

There’s one last chapter to the story, however, with a bonus track that sits outside of the main story, but is intrinsically linked. Co-produced with another experimentalist in Onsy, ‘HISS CORRUPTION’ is a dense, final wave of textural sound that prevents the cleaner resolution of ‘EPILOGUE’. While built on layers of manipulated static and white noise, a submerged, pulsing beat struggles faintly against their combined smothering - as if to say that the conflict is dormant but its tension remains with a corrupted echo of the journey.

Archetype Vol. 1 is by no means an easy listen - but it isn’t meant to be. In channeling complex psychological concepts, it establishes JOMANIA as a technically formidable artist who offers a compelling and sophisticated example of fusional, experimental music.