E-saggila

Toronto-based Rita Mikhael crafts noisy, atmospheric techno as E-Saggila. After co-founding Summer Isle in 2014 she issued an initial run of cassettes on the imprint, which drew swift notice from the experimental electronic underground and led to her first appearance on the U.K. label Opal Tapes with the 2016 release Old Orders of Beauty. BANK Records NYC subsequently handled her earliest vinyl pressings, among them the 2017 EP Tools of My Purpose and the 2018 album Dedicated to Sublimity.

Born in Iraq, Mikhael spent her formative years in Toronto amid the Gulf War. An outsider by temperament, she was drawn to harsh noise, industrial, techno, and above all Muslimgauze. In 2014 she launched a noise and power-electronics project under her initials RM, followed a year later by the cassette Devotion that introduced the industrial-techno guise E-Saggila. Additional tapes soon followed; two further Opal Tapes outings—2016’s Old Orders of Beauty and 2017’s Lux Campaign—carried her work beyond Toronto. Her first vinyl statement, the BANK Records NYC edition Tools of My Purpose, featured some of her most aggressive material to date and was succeeded by the equally intricate yet devastating full-length Dedicated to Sublimity in 2018. Northern Electronics issued My World My Way, shaped by gabber, industrial, and power electronics, in 2019.