01 Willing In The Name Of (ft. Seraphim)
02 Gusgazzler
03 Eyes See What The Camera Cannot Feel
04 Sufism And Scouting
05 The Warriors Loosened Their Belts (ft. Seraphim)
06 As We Are (ft. Armand Hammer) [explicit]
07 Diaspora Shocking
08 Whiff Tickle (ft. Che Chen)
09 Press This Button If You Pain (ft. Seraphim)
10 Absolootlimb (ft. Abdul Hakim Bilal & Seraphim) [explicit]
11 Home Away From Funeral Home
12 Fiancé To The Bullet
13 Deleting Your Horoscope (ft. Richie Culver & Seraphim)
14 Cyphers Become Sifr (ft. Abbas Zahedi)
15 Physio-Sacred
16 Ten Inch Reverb (ft. Lester St. Louis & Seraphim)
17 A Good Day To Blast Off
Who do we play with when the sandbox has no edge?
The fifth album from Saint Abdullah & Eomac began as a poem and became a record that refuses to stay in one place. The title arrived in a cab in Paris. Mohammad Mehrabani read it aloud from a list of options. Ian McDonnell said: that’s interesting, what does that mean? The answer, it turned out, was the album.
Saint Abdullah, the project Mehrabani formed with his brother Mehdi in 2016, has always operated in the space where sound does what language and data cannot. Not protest music in any conventional sense, but music built on the conviction that a three-minute composition can reach places no statistic or body count ever will. Since 2020, Eomac, the Irish producer and composer based in Wicklow, has been central to that project. Together they have released four albums; Patience of a Traitor, Chasing Stateless, Light Meteors Crashing Around You Will Not Confuse You and Of No Fixed Abode. When The Sandbox Has No Edge pushes further in every direction.
The record is rooted in hip hop, but its cast tells you how far it travels. Abbas Zahedi, Richie Culver, and Armand Hammer contribute vocals and poetry. Lester St. Louis brings cello. Che Chen of 75 Dollar Bill brings guitar. The producer and sound designer Seraphim contributed textures and sound designs throughout. Samples run deep, from records pulled from charity shops to market stalls on road trips across the UK.
Most of the source material was made in 2024 and 2025, when Mohammad moved to London and he and Ian could work more closely together. There was no studio. Mehrabani set up in his daughter Yara’s bedroom with two Roland SP-404s and a stack of Seraphim’s sound designs, and worked until the machines had nothing left to give. The constraints were the point. The limited setup forced invention, new techniques, a kind of urgency that bled into the music. What emerged from those sessions would travel to Wicklow, where McDonnell shaped raw fragments into fully formed compositions, structuring the chaos without flattening it.
The artwork, by Iranian-born artist and architect Elham Goodarzi, extends the album’s logic into visual space. Since 2023, Goodarzi has been manipulating archival photographs of Middle Eastern architecture, some dating back to 1915, taken by European photographers travelling through Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. She layers, erases, repositions, and layers again, producing structures that feel like they belong to an architectural movement lost somewhere between history and the future. The buildings are recognisable but impossible. They look like ruins that haven’t happened yet. Frozen in a state of change, as Goodarzi describes them. The sandbox, rendered without an edge.
As Abbas Zahedi put it in a line that has stayed with them: “I feel like we practice an open-sourced version of Islam.” The idea echoes across centuries. Imam Ali, in the 7th century: the taxation on knowledge is spreading it. The philosopher Reza Negarestani, whose theory-fiction blurs the line between the real and the invented, between the Middle East as a geographical place and the Middle East as a speculative proposition. The Sorbonne scholar Henry Corbin, who wrote about Iran-Vej, the original Iranian land that does not appear on any map, a place Corbin called “the eighth climate,” existing somewhere beyond geography, at the axis of spiritual and imaginative experience. When The Sandbox Has No Edge operates in a similar territory. It is grounded in lived experience, in specific rooms in London and Wicklow, in specific wars, in specific records bought on specific roads. But it points somewhere else entirely.
