“This world betrayed me / Nah, I’ll never forgive this world for who it made me,” DJ Haram declares on “Remaining”, one of the most poignant moments on Beside Myself. That’s a fitting thesis statement bluntly spelled out during the early highlight from the debut album from the Brooklyn-by-way-of-Philly-by-way-of-Jersey-based producer. We’re living in a literal hellscape after all, and while the music’s creator, Zubeyda Muzeyyen, may have been nourished across those city’s vibrant club scenes, she’s using the power of radical thought to extend that energy out into a hedonistic, vigilante service to the culture that goes beyond just stimulating brain cells in varying degrees through dense, synthetic friction that is blistered and ruptured by beats weightier than those she’s crafted for constant collaborators Moor Mother as well as their own project, 700 Bliss, and her work with Armand Hammer members billy woods and ELUCID in both tandem and singular form.

Singular just as well is the right word to best describe DJ Haram’s chaos-minded stylistic approach. The 14-track block of guest-heavy tracks — the aforementioned Armand Hammer, Moor Mother, Moor Mother’s Irreversible Entanglements bandmate in trumpeter Aquiles Navarro alongside guitarist Abdul Hakim Bilal, Egyptian producer El Kontessa, and Jersey producer Kay Drizz are among its names — is an organic and electronic chemical reaction that combines visceral hip-hop and sexed up club beats, meditative poetry and punked up mantras, as well as samples of traditional Middle Eastern music with Arabic bars scribed over it. Timelines shift within seconds, merging the past of humanity’s ugly history with its future dystopia.

In a sense, Beside Myself is the messier product of Kim Gordon’s solo efforts No Home Record and The Collective, where cleaner lines between noise and pop merged the decidedly political and anti-capitalist with an ultra-modern, electronic subversion. DJ Haram’s soundscapes feel headier and heavier, necessitating your full-cortex focus. She keeps your attention fixed, be it fraught in terror or thirst-trapped in thought provocatively. It’s what we need to hear right now.

Highlights: “Remaining”, “Voyeur”, “IDGAF”

DJ Haram’s Beside Myself is available now on Hyperdub.

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