Why has Cairo's house scene stayed under the radar?
Every "global house" conversation of the last five years runs through Lagos and Johannesburg: amapiano's crossover, the Afro house wave on European festival bills, the Black Coffee effect. Cairo barely gets a mention, even though the city has had its own underground dance scene for decades, built in basements and after-hours rooms far from the commercial EDM festivals that dominate Egypt's dance music headlines. Baher (Baher Eid) came up inside that scene before relocating to Minneapolis, where he founded the label Rakete Records. Four years after its last release, he's bringing the imprint back with Fragments, a five-track EP that treats Cairo's underground not as a footnote but as half the record's DNA (per Scene Noise).
What's actually on Fragments?
The tracklist is Afrika, Basement Rose, Time Machine, Sun Knights and Journey To Juno, and the EP is built almost entirely on hardware: Roland's 707 and 909 drum machines for the rhythm section, a Juno-106 for the pads and leads. Sun Knights nods to Berlin's Panorama Bar and golden-era house, while Journey To Juno leans fully into the 106's warmth, per the dance music outlet 909originals, which covered the release ahead of its September 30 date.
Catalogued as RKT 04, Fragments is Rakete's fourth release overall, and notably Baher's first release on the label he founded himself: four years of running Rakete for other artists before putting his own name on a sleeve. The record is mastered at DDA Mastering, the artwork is by Severja, and it ships as a limited 12-inch vinyl pressing, also stocked by Juno Records and Redeye Records, alongside a digital release via Bandcamp distributed through KMA60.
What does reviving a dormant label say about the scene?
A four-year hiatus is a long time for any label, long enough that most would assume Rakete had quietly folded. Bringing it back with a hardware-only EP, rather than an easy digital-only comeback single, is a statement about what the label stands for. Scene Noise frames Fragments as a bridge between "two vastly different dance music landscapes": Cairo's raw, rave-adjacent club intensity on one side, Minneapolis's utilitarian warehouse culture and crate-digging tradition on the other. Per 909originals, Rakete describes Baher's approach to music as rooted in curiosity and craft.
"Curiosity, versatility, and a deep respect for the craft, both musically and as a communal underground space."
That's not festival-circuit language. It's the language of someone who has spent years in record shops and small rooms on two continents, and it shows in a record built from machines that predate most of the DJs who'll end up playing it out.
