The first thing Selwa Abd told me when when I met her in the back of a Japanese tea shop in Manhattan was that she had no internet at her house. Not because of an outage or some technical issue, though: she had gotten rid of her Comcast subscription in favor of the NYC Mesh, a non-commercial, peer-to-peer network that anyone can join by putting a little node on their roof. It was taking longer than expected to get the connection set up, because Abd is always busy, and so is the friend helping with the installation. "It's complex, because he needs to go to another building with an antenna and then come to my building, but it's worth it," she said. "Honestly it's so fast, and who knows what Verizon or Optimum do with the information they take from you." So, no internet, and lots of getting work done in coffee shops before interviews with journalists. But also, permanent freedom from corporate infrastructure.

I didn't ask Abd what exactly she was working on when I arrived, but there were many possibilities. Her own music, for one, which she mostly self-releases at the dizzying average of a record a month. Graphic design, which she studied in school and still does on a freelance basis, sometimes for labels like the Jacktone offshoot Dreamtone. Bizaarbazaar, the music blog she started as a teenager in Morocco and continues to maintain over a decade later. Or Pick Up The Flow, a private Facebook group she cofounded for local artists to swap gear and help each other find jobs and apartments. (Abd decided to jump onto the Mesh after her friend hosted a Pick Up The Flow skillshare at The Lot Radio, which uses the network to broadcast its livestream.)

Despite her clear aptitude for music, Abd still doesn't want to be defined by what she plays (she is adamant to highlight that it's not only techno), or the fact that she plays anything at all. "A lot of people see me as a DJ, but they don't see me out of that box, which I don't like," she tells me. "It's just one hat. It's like if you have six hats and someone saw you with a red hat and decided like, 'Oh, you're a red hat person.'"

Just as important to Abd is her organizer hat. Music might be her main form of expression, but building networks—in the true community sense, not the shallow corporate one—is what animates her. Throughout her ten years in New York, she's both witnessed and experienced the infuriating realities of making art in a country that doesn't value the people who make it. She uses each of her own steps forward to illuminate the way for her peers. Pick Up The Flow (which she emphasizes is a co-creation with her former New School teacher Stephen Decker) is at first glance one of many online posting boards. But under Abd's co-facilitation with Decker and other members, it serves a larger purpose: to increase transparency about the business side of art, as well as help artists share skills that can lead to more stable technical work. In other words, a way to show that making art is a real job, and that the time is long overdue to make it more sustainable. "Now is the time to fight for my friends—people struggling to find opportunities, relying on music but hardly making it," Abd says. "I want to fight for a structure that would allow more opportunities for people to flourish. I don't know how I can do it, but I'm sure I'll find out."

Before arriving in New York, Abd lived with her family in Casablanca, the largest city in her native Morocco. Music was always present in some way. Her dad played in a surf rock band, and their home stereo warbled out Motown, soul and French chansons. There was also plenty of traditional Moroccan music. "I hated it," Abd says. "I associated it with my parents dragging me to weddings, where I just wanted to sleep, but there was this loud music. At the same time I loved it in a way, because it's rhythmic."

When she started making her own music, it was just "a way to kill time." There was a piano in the house, and she taught herself to play a song by watching YouTube. She sometimes tooled around in GarageBand but found it frustrating. "It was hard because it's so regimented, and I didn't know how things worked," she says. Then SoundCloud came along, and an uncharted universe opened, ready for Abd to explore. Before long, she'd discovered so much music that she couldn't keep it to herself. Bizaarbazaar was born. "It was was a way to archive all the sonic discoveries, but also share and amplify people I liked," she says. "I'm still doing it because it's so nice." Her first posts were album write-ups, and she soon added artist interviews. Virtually, she began to inhabit a creative community that stretched across continents.

But physically, she was still stuck in Morocco. "It was suffocating," she says. "I felt over-protected by my family and society. It's such a luxurious life—everything is cheap and easy and the food is great—but I was really depressed. Morocco doesn't have an active creative scene where you feel like you have to do something."

She began to plot an escape to New York, where she had wanted to live since visiting on a family trip at age eight. At 17, she made the move and enrolled as a graphic and communications design student at The New School. "I came to the States because I needed to forge my own identity," she says. "I felt that my life needed to be dictated by my ideals, dreams and experiences, and New York symbolized freedom and independence. It was exactly what I needed."

Her studies were stultifying the first two years. To keep herself motivated, she returned to the same coping mechanism she'd used in Morocco. "I worked on music every day because I hated my schoolwork. It was my refuge," she says. Her experimentations grew into a sparse sound that she continues to explore, featuring just a few elements at a time, each showing a different kind of off-kilter sound design. She has never been precious about her output or her process. If she doesn't know how to do something, she messes around until she gets what she needs. If she doesn't have access to particular equipment or tools, she does without them. In a world of endless software updates and multi-thousand-dollar bedroom studios, her deskilled (although far from unskilled) approach stands out.

It also comes through on her records, which rather than being agonizingly-polished artifacts are rough-gem snapshots of whatever experiment she's trying out at a particular moment. Each one showcases the unfamiliar rhythms and distortions she coaxes out of familiar equipment like the Korg ER-1. The drum machine's acid squelches and metallic beats run through most of her work. "When I came to New York, that was the first time I was able to buy real gear," she says. "I knew so many people were using that machine, so I bought it on Craigslist, and once I got it I spent all my time working on it and making music." Since then, she hasn't let up. Last year, she posted 16 EPs to her Bandcamp. (She notes proudly that, save for records on Börft and Optimo, she has kept her music away from the exploitative clutches of Spotify and Amazon.) The first 2019 release, titled خ after the seventh letter of the Arabic alphabet, covers four tracks of murky, electro-tinged techno. There were also two EPs of hip-hop and R&B edits (Aaliyah, Snoop Dogg, Missy Elliott, Usher), a collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Greg Zifcak (her husband), and Chaos, a glossier selection of dance floor-ready tracks (the Börft record).

This breakneck pace of releases suits her approach to production. She describes it as intuitive, which is also where the name comes from—early 20th century French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson, who argued that intuition, not rational thought or science, is the key to understanding reality, experience and the creative process. Abd discovered his ideas via Bergsonism, a 1966 book on Bergson's ideas by Gilles Deleuze, which she read excerpts of at the New School. But she assures me that no one needs to read Bergson or Deleuze to understand Bergsonist. "The idea Deleuze is defending is that just that intuition is the best method to legitimate any creative act," she says. "The way I approach creativity is similar. It's always naive. I reject knowledge and technicalities to find my own systems, which are not conventional, but they work for me."

I watched these systems materialize last summer, when Abd played a live set at Sublimate, a long-running monthly that serves as a family get-together for the friendlier side of the Brooklyn underground. Abd played on a folding table to the side of the DJ booth with a desk lamp illuminating her setup. Where many producers go for complicated rigs, Abd prefers to keep it straightforward, bringing just four pieces of gear. There was no computer; she only recently got Ableton, and uses it sparingly. Hardware, she says, speaks to her more clearly. "It's so simple, so physical. You see each sound source and you plug each one in. There's no routing, no choosing an option. It just makes sense."

She didn't look up much for the hour that she played, from 2-3 AM, her gaze darting instead between her instruments and a notebook filled with color-coded notations. She writes one of these scores for every live set she plays and now has over 1000 spread through dozens of notebooks. "When I play I need to go straight to the point," she says, "and with live sets I hate wandering around." Same with DJing: a few months later, she played an early slot at a party in the basement kitchen of a tourist-trap restaurant in Little Italy. Rather than drop offbeat bangers, she focused on house and disco tracks that sent a clear message of approachable weirdness. Again, Abd rarely looked at the crowd, but she didn't seem to need to. Everyone, from the camo-clad ravers to business-casual types letting loose after the work week, was dancing.