fatima al qadiri ILM edition, (+ ayshay + future brown)

there was a sandbox thread but

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJQJOxb2u3U

<3 this EP, glad to see others do too. Well, "Vatican Vibes", "Hip Hop Spa" and especially "D-Medley" are essential, I can live without the other two tracks.

but "How Can I Resist U" is the best one.

video is totally unsettling. that song now sounds terrifying

Dunno, "How Can I Resist U" doesn't sound mind-blowingly new to me - if someone told me it was a recent track by Guido or someone like that I wouldn't be surprised. This on the other hand is a musical direction I haven't heard before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsbG4pXrhr8

"Fatima Al Qadiri's 'How Can I Resist U' is a love letter to London in general and Dubstep (before it wobbled) in particular. "Lenden" as it's known has become a historic site of pilgrimage for wealthy Arabs seeking the forbidden fruits of sex, drugs and alcohol.

Interspersed with Youtube footage of Ma'alaya dances specific to Gulf countries like UAE and Oman--the super cars, dancing girls and brutalist council estates in the video are part of the down-and-dirty dream that a trip to London signifies for Khaleejis (Gulf Arabs). The color of the video is based on an infamous Arab royal's custom 'Gulf Blue' Koenigsegg CCXR that terrorized the streets of the city's posh neighborhoods."

can a mod fix the thread title?

is this the same chick who did "warm eyes"?

no, that's just simply "fatima"

fatima is a swedish singer who lives in london

fatima al qadiri as a new yorker of kuwaiti heritage, and yeah she's wonderful - the genre-specific xperience ep totally blew my mind. i think "vatican vibes" is my favourite

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKosaf5tmpI

see also her warn-u ep, under the name ayshay, in which she reinterprets traditional islamic chants (and then nguzunguzu remix them).

kind of feel that while mixing influences and cultures is commonplace right now, she's one of the few producers doing something interesting with that fusion rather than overlaying signifiers divorced from their contexts on top of each other.

(while also still making banging, gorgeous music)

oh wait, we're talking about 3 people!

there's the l.a. fatima who did "warm eyes" and works with dam funk and shafiq husayn and there's the swedish/london fatima who did the follow you ep with floating points. i didn't realize those were different people til now and assumed follow you was the work of the former.

kind of feel that while mixing influences and cultures is commonplace right now, she's one of the few producers doing something interesting with that fusion rather than overlaying signifiers divorced from their contexts on top of each other.

― tinie tempurah (lex pretend), Friday, January 20, 2012 12:14 AM Bookmark

otm

no the london fatima is the one who worked with dâm-funk and shafiq husayn

i'm SURE it is anyway, i'd just happily assumed

oh wait, you are right. i had just assumed fatima was from l.a. cause she works with all these l.a. ppl.

rev have you heard much ahu? if you like fatima i think you'll like her

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq0QoQeOFPY

+ this amazing mix http://www.brainfeedersite.com/2009/07/20/vida-ahu-nova/

don't want to derail the thread but this fatima tune w/ onra & pursuit grooves is really something else

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rILjt_FL4RQ

it's amazing how the genre specific xperience EP seems to have this really limited sonic palette - like it's just super clean synth sounds, a drum machine - no fade or reverb or any of the 'dirtying' effects that lots of synth players like to use. and yet the whole thing is really captivating

I learned in 2011 that I'm kind of a sucker for the beautiful hypnotic sound of synth steel drums

I'm not really feeling this stuff - I sort of respect her for going for this aesthetic but I don't think the combination of the sound palette and the level of repetition does her any favours. Listening to it I just feel like I'm running around some murky underwater cave level in a Playstation game.

that's the idea, basically

which the mv for 'vatican vibes' makes p explicit

yeah, was gonna say "murky underwater cave level in a Playstation game" isn't a bad description of why I like it: it's immersive but alienating.

Fatima Al Qadiri's 'How Can I Resist U' is a love letter to London in general and Dubstep (before it wobbled) in particular. "Lenden" as it's known has become a historic site of pilgrimage for wealthy Arabs seeking the forbidden fruits of sex, drugs and alcohol.

btw did y'all know that osama bin laden's niece is a dalston hipster?

Yeah it's just that, I dunno, if I'm going to sit down and listen to something at home I like it to bring a bit more to the table.

(xpost)

I think it's telling and great that you used playstation and not nintendo - this is prob the first video-game influenced music I've heard that doesn't fall into the rabbit hole of chip tunes + chrono trigger midis

but above all her sense of melody is really refined and exquisite - like hte first time my friend sent me a youtube, I was like, that was p good, but within 5 minutes I went back to the youtube and played it again, and again, and again

like, I didn't expect myself to be taken in by such a simple sound palette (like I said above) but I was! she has a really good ear

i wonder what it says that i love this kind of music but have never played video games

You approach it without baggage - see also Rustie, Ikonika etc. I find those connotations a bit problematic really.

why problematic?

like the whole DIS/nguzunguzu visual aesthetic so far has been really corny maya 3d renderings circa 1998 reappropriated for hipster use, don't see why appropriating the sound of that is off limits

i guess the "sounds like a videogame soundtrack" works a bit like how the Ghost Box aesthetic mines sounds that were buried in your subconscious in your childhood. I can understand being wary of music that draws on childhood nostalgia for its power, but i don't think that's really happening here. but i'm 33 so this doesn't really sound like the games i played as a kid. so while i got your playstation comment, i didn't really think "this sounds like playstation" when i first heard this.

It's problematic for me for the same reason I wouldn't put on an orchestral film soundtrack when I could listen to a symphony, it just feels kind of naff. Also when I play video games I usually turn the sound down and put other music on.

Also (and I know this is a bit unfair on Al Qadiri since she obviously knows what she's doing with her source material better than most of these losers) I'm getting a bit of a naff 90s hippie smoking compilation vibe from the whole aesthetic. Possibly the album art isn't helping here.

that could be a really good poll, actually, to see how many film soundtracks ILM owns

idk if I would call it 90s hippie smoking compilation, more like purposeful hipster 'I don't care' transposed onto computers

http://i.imgur.com/S6V44.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/uNxj6.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/e3MhE.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/dm5Ex.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_pFkO9Qep8

maybe this aesthetic is 'in' right now

heh i didnt realize she had her album release party at the new museum, which, of course

is that the one on the bowery?

which, yeah, of course

it's worth noting that FAQ has written the global.wav column for DIS for a couple years

http://dismagazine.com/blog/global-wav/

Genre-Specfic Xperience remix package set for release on March 27, which will include reworks from Kingdom, Girl Unit, Ikonika, DJ Rashad, and more.

o_o

:o

I approve of this mining of my geeky heritage

this "corpcore" remix is pretty wild! not sure if this is part of the release that's coming out on the 27th but very excited to hear the rest of them.

http://soundcloud.com/shockdiamond/fatima-al-qadiri-corpcore

Genre-Specfic Xperience remix package set for release on March 27, which will include reworks from Kingdom, Girl Unit, Ikonika, DJ Rashad, and more.

what happened to

ikr?

Fatima Al Qadiri ‏ @FatimaAlQadiri
@[me] yup, may 22 is the release date!

okay dennnnn

http://soundcloud.com/unouno/fatima-al-qadiri-corpcore-kingdom

REMIQSIS. I LIKE THE REMIQSIS.

yeah, it's a pretty solid collection

Wish I still had all my Bryce 3D turquoise iMac .jpegs.

Apparently the next Fade to Mind release will be by Fatima al Qadiri?

!

http://www.thefader.com/2012/10/03/stream-fatima-al-qadiri-ghost-raid/

I wish I hadn't read the blurb : (

ameliorative coos

that's some "synth gurgles" shit

Oh, looking forward to this. Only thing I could say that about on Fade to Mind.

Nodding my head @ that post.

:/

those nguzu/mikeq/rizzla eps are 100% classics

Didn't know Mike Q had a release, will check this out!

lol some people seem to go out of their way to state how much they don't like fade to mind

really good interview with her in the fader

http://www.thefader.com/2012/11/12/interview-fatima-al-qadiri/

she is awesome

I wanted to get more profesh.

<3

Does the Desert Strike EP count for 'albums' in the EoY poll?

Also, there wasn't any stuff out as Ayshay this year I missed, was there?

sure; no

tbh I'm not as impressed with Desert Strike as GSX :/

I like it a lot more, but then I never listened to GSX as much because I was too busy listening to 'Warn-U' on repeat when I found out about her.

GSX is very much my favorite thing she's done.

Fair play, I think she's awesome in general - I guess my favour lies with the less beat-heavy stuff? I dunno, could be talking out of my ass there, I should go back and give it more of a chance now I'm not just rotating the one track.

I live and die for the beat :)

Not beat-centric here but the vibrant lushness of tracks like Hip-Hop Spa are my favourite thing about FAQ's music. I do like Desert Strike but I suspect I'll find 25 other things I prefer.

tbh I'm not as impressed with Desert Strike as GSX :/

― these bitches is my sons and i make dad jokes (The Reverend), Thursday, November 29, 2012 8:28 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah same here - I think desert strike is supposed to be more 'reserved' and 'meditative' but unfortch for me that just means 'more boring'

did anyone check out the EP of remixes of GSX?

Fair play, I think she's awesome in general - I guess my favour lies with the less beat-heavy stuff? I dunno, could be talking out of my ass there

― emil.y, Friday, November 30, 2012 1:42 AM (19 hours ago)

m8 what ever happened to the traditional english 'arse'

Anything new?

https://soundcloud.com/future-brown/wanna-party-ft-tink/s-zjDxm

yessssssssssssssssssss

:)

Album announced, on Hyperdub.

http://www.factmag.com/2014/02/11/fatima-al-qadiri-signs-to-hyperdub-for-debut-album-asiatisch/

!

Whhop whoop!

looking forward to this, saw her dj a couple of weeks ago and she was terrific

weirdly not into any of the future brown stuff so far tho

Yeah, I saw her as well. Amazing. Wasn't expecting it to be so good.

‘Asiatisch’ is a provocation which asks more questions than it answers. The title is the German word for Asian. Unlike its title, however, the music on ‘Asiatisch’ revolves around the fantasies of east Asia as refracted through pulpy Western pop culture, in particular, Hollywood, literary fiction, music, cartoons and advertising. Fatima asks what is meant by the term ‘Asian’ in a digital age of viral interchange and the hi-speed trading of cultural bytes, the concept of ‘shanzhai’ proves pivotal, a term whose meaning stems from a wild, out of control zone of banditry, but which has come to be used to refer to the Chinese counterfeiting of Western brands and goods.

While ‘sinogrime’ has had many copyists over the last few years, ‘Asiatisch’ is really the first record that attempts to articulate this weird complex of sonic interchanges between the West and China. With the exception of the opening track, ‘Shanzhai’, a haunting cover of ‘Nothing Compares to You’ with nonsensical Mandarin lyrics, and the shimmering ‘Loading Beijing’, ‘Wudang’ and ‘Jade Stairs’ which sample and distort classical Chinese poetry staging an epic confrontation between China’s ancient soul and the onslaught of the industrial factory machine, most of the tracks blend mallets, bells, gongs, flutes, steel drums and choral atmospherics with the searing synth-brass and the skittering drums of grime, playing melodies that are inflected as much by classic R&B as to synthetic versions of traditional Chinese music. On “Dragon Tattoo” for example, stereotypical iconography of imagined China is slotted into a threatening, robotic R&B format. The carefree pirating of Western brands blurs into a soft-synth pirating of Chinese musical signs.

Tracklist:

1- Shanzhai (For Shanzhai Biennial) (feat. Helen Feng)
2 – Szechuan
3 – Wudang
4 – Loading Bejing
5 – Hainan Island
6 – Shenzhen
7 - Dragon Tattoo
8 – Forbidden City
9 – Shanghai Freeway
10 – Jade Stars

not sure what i think about this album. it's certainly...interesting?

I like that writeup

http://i.imgur.com/cMqCrFi.jpg

Maybe she should have just called it China tho

lol the "write-up" is the press release

It's a good write-up

Or called it shanzhai - remember seeing a talk about this ages ago, it originally means fortress or stronghold - referring to the secured places where counterfeit goods were produced by crime/black market syndicates, often in the countryside. Since then it's being broadly associated with pirate cultures and parodies, etc.

I like the idea of having a "fortress phone" tho.

really want to hear this

You can hear 'Shanghai Freeway' as the first track on Benji B's show here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03whf88

Sounds alright, similar to the EPs, but I'm really keen to check out this "haunting cover" of ‘Nothing Compares 2U’!

Someone's excited about the new FA-Q stuff...

http://distilleryimage8.ak.instagram.com/d16c4d62a78f11e3b2e912fba4e20b68_8.jpg

the explanation of the title & concept is interesting but this - most of the tracks blend mallets, bells, gongs, flutes, steel drums and choral atmospherics with the searing synth-brass and the skittering drums of grime, playing melodies that are inflected as much by classic R&B as to synthetic versions of traditional Chinese music - sounds horrendous. was thinking this morning how in the 90s people would put Hip Hop Beats over everything, & how dated that sounds now, & this sounds like it might the equivalent. I will give this a go though, she always comes across well even though none of her music has clicked yet

This is really quite marvelous: https://soundcloud.com/hyperdub/fatima-al-qadari-szechuan

This album is reliably great and weird.

More and more with FAQ I feel like my original, perverse-at-the-time flash on Bel Canto's White-Out Conditions is the correct critical framework.

ultimately the album left me pretty disappointed, it's a bit...one-dimensional for someone like FAQ and i'm not sure i'm that interested in whatever the one idea she's ploughing is

Had stupidly assumed that the thread lex started the other day was in reference to new music by this artist.

I've only heard that "Szechuan" single so far but her Pitchfork interview could be used to start a new "most tedious thing said by worthless idiot" poll. It's pretty bad.

Huh? Why is it bad? Maybe some of the stuff about University professors is a bit, I dunno, deferential - but she's no John Maus.

haven't read the p4k piece but she's one of the smartest and most interesting interviewees i've ever had

i feel like she's deliberately confined herself to like 5% of what she can do on this album, maybe in service of making it coherent but the impact of an ep like genre-specific xperience was so much greater

i read in some interview that she just made the music first and came up with the concept later though.

See I think it might be the other way around; this and desert strike are more typical of what she's about, and genre xperience was the same but also just happened to have some really great tunes

with artists like FAQ, Vatican Shadow, etc., i find the concept more interesting than the actual music. it just sounds sorta half-assed, or the artistic ambition outpaces the uhhh... music making part of the equation

i'm the opposite with vatican shadow, i love the music but strictly on its basis i can barely work out what the concept is supposed to be, or even if there is one beyond vaguely meaningful titles and mood

FAQ comes up with interesting concepts for sure but i meant this album sounds like 5% of what she can do sonically

Are you strictly going by sonic palette, or are you also including things like melody rhythm etc

Because it seems she's drawing on the same toolbox she always has

well yeah, melody and rhythm too?

Part of it is that I have a serious distaste for the grad-student/art-magazine way of speaking, and just generally for postmodern twaddle like that. I mean, I get it - we perceive things not as they are but coloured by our own identities and surroundings. But while I enjoy some of these postmodern musicians who use a light touch with their appropriation politics (of the DIS magazine crowd I prefer Yen Tech and ADR) I find FTQ's vagueness stifling, precious, and humorless.

The first song sounds vaguely like "Nothing Compares 2 U"?!? Kinda with lex on the rest tho, if not as stridently. Most of it feels like stuff she's done before, and more on the Desert Strike end than the GSX (or Ayshay) end, unfortunately.

First song is a cover of Nothing Compares 2 U.

I feel that lex is also maybe letting her DJ sets color his reading of this? Obviously she's great live, but the record also just sounds to me like the same palette as usual.

Re: grad-student/art-magazine way of speaking - yeah, but that's pretty much her scene tho, isn't it? She's as much in dialogue with contemporary art as much as with being a producer/DJ. I don't find her vague at all though, I guess my only complaint is that conceptually what's she's saying is completely straightforward and not really that interesting imo. The mediation of cultural difference, in some ways the premediation of direct experience. What's more interesting is the exploration of that in terms of contemporary China as a topic - she probably could have gone much further with it.

Still dig the record tho, the first track is the best. It would have been cool if she had done an album entirely of pop karaoke covers.

but the record also just sounds to me like the same palette as usual.

Yeah which is why lex's comments confused me - I take 'sonically' to refer more to the sounds themselves empirically received - so I was imagining lex was implying that she like, only let herself use keys C, F, and G in a single octave or something

Haven't had much time to digest yet but 'Wudang' is as good as anything she's ever done imo

Keep flashing on this while I listen to it, think that Hyperdub Twitter might have even linked to the story around the time the record was coming out: Ordos

Like to expand on my comment above

GSX, to my ears and judging from the music videos, at least partially influenced by 32-bit era video game soundtracks? Post-MIDI but pre-multimillion dollar live orchestra recordings used now

There's definitely a poppiness to soundtracks of that era that made its way into GSX

But I don't think she's confined herself to some theoretical armature, this doesn't feel like the aural equivalent of a Georges Perec novel

She's just doing what she's always been doing which is why I find the notion that she somehow 'limited' herself on this album to be weird

Has she done anything under the Ayshay name since Warn-U?

I mean Asiatisch doesn't sound far off from the original Warn-U imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJobaxZqy18

It was the NGUZUNGUZU megamix that made it hot

Hm actually the megamix is something I haven't heard before

I was thinking of the remix

https://soundcloud.com/nguzunguzu/warn-u-nguzunguzu-remix

i didn't find desert strike as engaging or varied as gsx tbh, but calling an ep overly limited would be odd. asiatisch probably wouldn't have felt disappointing if it was an ep rather than her debut album, actually - also, i think FAQ playing with mediated sounds that are other-to-her in the first place is less engaging than sounds that she's intimately familiar with.

I'd sort of forgotten about gsx (and everything since really) which is maybe why i find this quite charming, I suppose I didn't have any weight of expectations going in.

It's not world-changing, certainly.

Yeah, that's true. I'm not sure I quite get the logic of: Kuwaiti expat via NYC does Chinese-imaginary record. I suppose it's just general alterity, or accelerationist Orientalism, something like that.

Hmmm... I should qualify that, I like the idea of exploring contemporary media imaginaries around China, but it also seems a bit jarring as lex points w/ her work up until now focussed on the Middle East, war, religion, commercial digital utopia/imaginaries. It sort of fits, but also maybe the concept needed to be articulated in another way, or she should have really pushed it further. By itself, it hardly makes a lot of sense, except that all high-tech mediation/alter-modernity is somehow up for grabs.

Also the links made in some promo-material to sino-grime I found a bit... tenuous.

You mean everything China is up for grabs

I'm just trying to figure out the people who are repping for the Ayshay EP but not this

the ayshay ep is way different?

i don't know if i'd have wanted warn-u or desert strike in album length either though

Anyway I'm a little uncomprehending of the 'but it's so conceptual' reasoning because each of her releases have been like this

In 1992, ten year old Fatima Al Qadiri bought a copy of Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf, a top-down shooter game for Sega Megadrive based on Operation Desert Storm. A year prior, Kuwait’s inhabitants had experienced the apocalyptic vision of aerial bombings, air raid sirens, and skies filled with smoke from black oil fires. Time collapsed, schools closed, Fatima and her sister, Monira, spent their entire time at play-and began an addiction to video games that lasted for several years.

Playing “Desert Strike”, a game that coldly depicts strikes on civilian and military targets was an amalgamation of actual and virtual war game realities for Al Qadiri. This EP of original works is dedicated to the synthesis of terror and child-like wonder, to the strategies of imagination and gaming, while sonically paying homage to the militaristic futurism of early grime.

With sparse, decisive percussion, Desert Strike’s 5 tracks showcase Fatima’s melodic virtuosity. Intro Ghost Raid, named after “The Ghost” F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter, launches an aerial bombardment that subsides to sand-blasted lull. Oil Well’s half time, freeform progression speaks to the seductive wealth beneath the earth’s surface. The cinematic crunk of War Games and the title track Desert Strike evoke virtual military action, the sound of toy drones seeking recursive targets. Lush and sparse Hydra reminds us of a vast, toxic horizon revived by streams of liquid life.

New York-based Kuwaiti visual artist and composer Fatima Al Qadiri is a genre-mixing phenomenon. The artist recently hosted an album release party and panel discussion for her EP Genre-Specific Xperience (Uno) at the New Museum. The EP is comprised of Fatima's take on five subgenres of dance music: juke, hip hop, dubstep, electro-tropicalia, and '90s-era Gregorian trance. In turn, Fatima worked collaboratively with artists to create visuals for each song on the album, resulting in five socially conscious music videos involving religion, technology, and the isolation of the Internet. Al Qadiri explained her interest in genres that permeate all aspects of our lives: "The high heel is a genre of a shoe; the kitten heel, for instance, is a sub-genre."

San Francisco-based Kamau Patton created the video for Al Qadiri's "Hip Hop Spa." The artist envisioned the idea of a hip-hop spa as a place where "you could get a green tea facial and smoke a blunt," and the video depicts typical hip-hop video elements—money, women, drugs—and films them in a disaffected, distorted and rough manner. The results heavily mirror the video "How Can I Resist U," by Qatar-based Sophia Al-Maria, a dubstep track and a "love letter to London, dubstep and being a Gulf Arab" that collages YouTube clips of female dancers at Middle Eastern men's-only parties. The dance the women perform could be lifted from a New Orleans bounce video and suggests the universality of sexual behavior. Fatima acknowledges, "The video is about temptation and the relationship between the Gulf and London, how London represents a kind of forbidden fruits playground for Gulf Arabs for several decades now."

The final song on the EP, "Corpcore," shown with a video by Ryan Trecartin and Los Angeles-based Rhett LaRue, collages stock film footage and computer graphics images. The idea that these visuals, which now appear aesthetically ironic, are visuals that that same crowd grew up with—and were subsequently influenced by—would seem to encapsulate a "sub-genre" of meaning within the EP itself.

Again it seems to me that any deficiency in the album isn't a result of FAQ's practices but maybe the listener's preferences - GSX has the advantage of reworking genres that we are all familiar with whereas Desert Strike & Asiatisch are not. Mostly to me it seems that her works have been on much more of a continuum than you seem to be suggesting lex

My main problem with this is that she called it Asiatisch (and, as the album art makes clear, 亚洲) when China doesn't really conceive itself as "Asian" in anything but a sense much lower on the scale than being "China" first

'but it's so conceptual' reasoning

no one has made this complaint

But the title probably reflects the transglobal perception of China as being metonymic for 'Asia' itself, accentuated by using the German name

Alright then, I'll call it the "but it's only ploughing one idea" complaint xp

Sonically, you mean? I would agree with that, listening to GSX again, I think that EP just does a better job nailing that sound.

But there's other directions. Again, the opening track is cool on this record.

lol I think of the ploughing one idea approach as an attempt to make a good background music record.

The XX approach

Her works are definitely on a continuum, it's just that this album doesn't do much to advance that continuum.

Another interview: http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/19759/1/fatima-al-qadiris-chinese-fantasy

I'm less and less convinced by the conceptual frame around this record, but I'm also unwilling to engage with some kind of cultural critique of it either...

You know, I feel like 'Chopsticks' is like the consummate imagined Chinese piece of music.

waht

don't recognise that piece at all
even so, consummate pseudo-chinese tune is surely

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_riff

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones/2014/05/fatima-al-qadiri-asiatisch-interview.html

her interviews are so interesting that i wish i liked the album

i keep wondering about how problematic appropriation is when it's intentional, because "doing" chinese culture through logic presets, from such a distance...uhhh. but it's kind of what she did on GSX (and indeed to her own culture as ayshay)?

like, the more i think about it the less i can actually justify the concept of the album because as much as you talk about how interesting doing a plastic refracted fake version of chinese culture is...you're still actually doing that and selling it

...yeah i haven't been able to get through the album for the reasons you mention. it's a bummer because what i've listened to ~sounds~ great but... oh well, curious to hear what she does next.

hm, kind of a shame helen feng's involvement in the album is so circumstantial, I wonder what she thinks of it

I really don't have any problems with the concept behind Asiatisch at all

Even if you consider it appropriative, Iggy Azalea this ain't; it's not a play for authenticity, it's in fact on the complete opposite side of the divide

The generative root of this album is how China is perceived in the West, not China itself; it's not mimicry, it's transformative

I don't think anybody would mistake the album for being anywhere close to the modern pop music that's being produced in the Sinosphere today - it's still a very FAQ album in the dye

Probably the biggest friction I have w/ the album isn't really with the album or with FAQ but rather with how people in those circles often pass over Chinese art and artists in favor of the work of Western expats who live in China for a few years

Not that they necessarily make bad work but it often just doesn't feel vital in any way, and it's lazy

I was most pissed off by the promotional material where the Shenzhen collective imitated irl the work of Yue Minjun, it felt kind of mean and small

Saw her DJ at a festvial in Athens without headhpones, it was sick.

So. The vinyl version of 'Wanna Party' only came out in the last month or so. But it was up on soundcloud in the middle of last year. EoY eligible or not? I actually wasn't that into it when I first heard it but it's been earworming regularly this year.

Definitely warmed to Asiatisch as a whole more when I started taking the train places, too. Great train record.

year of impact, go for it imo

Dunno whether to put this here or in the Nguzu thread but I don't like the Future Brown album at all :(

i like it.

Well, that got odd.

is this where the facebook-post thing goes; I mentioned this elsewhere but while I'm sympathetic if we're talking about "totally different realms" we should talk about the realm in which it is possible for anyone to just interview a band in a hype cycle whenever they please, on deadline, before writing a review

I would love to have an actual number on how many people give a shit about any of this

12-15

I mean, I will say that lex and meaghan both did good writing, and FB have a good response, and the Red Bull thing is a good conversation but like, the whole thing was predicated by "they sold out ICA" which holds like 350 people

there are 370 likes and 22 comments on the post at last check so let's start there

I didn't like lex's piece (sorry) and I think she made a load of salient points in her rebuttal but it kind of feels like, this is NAGL.

i like a lot of producers & DJs who are very theory-minded and conceptually-driven. when the music is dope, that's a huge plus. when it's not (and especially when there's buzz/heavy PR involved), it can rankle. i think it's the idea of music being critic-proof because it's supposedly working on this extra-musical level.

xp

For consistency's sake she should rebutt the grand theoretical claims made in all her positive reviews as well.

This scene in general is not particularly used to negative criticism and this is a terrible look.

I mean, my real problem with this whole thing is like, Red Bull/Pitchfork Rising/Fader/whatever came at this from the position of boosterism ie., Future Brown is the type of thing that looks good for our brand/is fun to think about/is "interesting" in the way that, say, covering the 900th pizzaburger garage rock wimps from California is not interesting...

Which is totally fine and cool and excellent w/e!

Then you have Red Bull and Pitchfork writing these takedowns of a band that hasn't really earned much of audience whatsoever (take those 3,871 Twitter followers to the bank, gang!) as if they were this sensation when really, the people who were paying the most attention were... Red Bull and Pitchfork?

It's like, in both cases, one editor set up a group of musicians as future thinking, just for writers to take them down for not properly respecting black culture? It just reads more like insular message-board arguments between music writers than anything that has to do with a group who's actively changing culture and/or building an actual audience?

I'm obviously being very very reductive here, but it's like, it's four non-white people making some interesting music that a few trend-hopping art-fucks and a handful of dorks are paying some attention to — honestly, what's wrong with just letting them cook?

*hits a gong*

I actually enjoyed reading FAQ's rebuttal after Lex's review. I think she makes some legit points about false assumptions - points I hadn't considered because I think the album's a snooze.

Feel like Lex is railing against the interpretation rather than the intent here but the interpretation didn't seem to bother FAQ when Asiatisch was getting fawning reviews.

But interpretation matters - one of the reasons I railed against Night Slugs back in the day was because in many critics' minds they ended up eclipsing the predominantly black British scene on whose coat tails they'd come up on. And what a surprise, people stopped writing about that original scene, or worse started regarding the NS guys as it's real auteurs. The exact same thing is happening with grime now and FAQ is a (critical) beneficiary of that.

i remember listening to future brown like, man, these guys could be the brown of the future

Also I feel like scenes like this get disproportionate coverage in the first place because the writers are too close to the artists in the first place, so the scene gets chummy and backslappy and there's barely any negative criticism (and therefore minimal impetus for the artists to get better, especially when they aren't particularly dancefloor oriented).

(I've no idea how close Future Brown are to the writers covering them by the way, just describing a wider phenomenon).

every time I try writing something about this I remember Sinead O'Connor's infamous "difficult brown" quote and start giggling

"The" is an important word there, at least for me

The difficult brown

true

I'd have to agree with this:

https://twitter.com/tomewing/status/571392579511697409

"I only liked you because my friend did and now he doesn't so ner ner ner"

Yeah, that's all I got out of that too.

it does suck to see people on my timeline using the Lex as an example of the sad state of internet-era arts journalism :(

i heard of fatima al-qadiri from people who actually like the future brown record iirc

I thought the premises were generally wrong and it made a bunch of assumptions and connections that I disagreed with but I'm still not sure how you could hold it up as "shitty internet journalism". You should make those guys read more internet music writing, Jordan, I imagine they'd be quite quite upset.

You really think that is what Tom is saying there?

I was about to say, that seemed like a strange take.

A smile and a middle-finger raised to anybody who would deny a musician her humanity and require her to be stoic and silent in the face of discourse

Whether or not Future Brown sold out the ICA is irrelevant, the participants are more visible than that (I think?) (I hope?) Cool tho that Tom gets to investigate Nguzunguzu that is an awesome adventure he has to look forward to

just to be clear i was referring to electronic music scene folks on twitter, not Tom.

xp

A smile and a middle-finger raised to anybody who would deny a musician her humanity and require her to be stoic and silent in the face of discourse

I keep coming back to this. The main reason why "never respond to criticism" became a truism is because 90% of the time, the artist responding was terrible at expressing their argument. When you hit an example of someone who does a good job of outlining the objection to the critical take on their work, I'd think it would be welcomed as something that expands upon the dialogue around the music in question.

can someone explain what Tom is saying there

He's pointing out that Lex has been a big booster for Nguzunguzu and to a lesser extent FAQ in the past so this is clearly not just an ad-hominem based on whatever agenda she's claiming in her FB post.

The thing that's tiresome about this is that FAQ is falling back on the standard Bluntian kneejerk-defensive "are you saying we're not allowed to do this?" when actually the the criticism is the age old "why do these vocalists only get press when they're presented in this context?" with a side order of "the execution is very poor here". FAQ is getting defensive because of aspersions cast on her own background, which is fair enough, but the rest of it is a drum that Lex has been consistently banging for years and with some justification. I've heard Timberlee and (especially) Riko sound so much more vital than they do here and if you can make Riko sound this lifeless then you're clearly doing something wrong.

no one has gone here so I will: I find it odd that meaghan and lex have been singled out consistently when they are far from the only negative-to-middling reviewers of this record. it'd make a bit more sense if it were just people only noticing the lead review on pitchfork or whatever, but I don't see anyone, FB or otherwise, raking (say) paul macinnes of the guardian over the coals for his three-star review containing the phrases "Read a style magazine (or check their Instagram feed) and you’d know that global cool is now a thing" and "it sounds like a curated exhibition" (from here: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/feb/26/future-brown-future-brown-review -- I don't have a problem with this review, to be clear, but this is the EXACT SAME THING.)

good to know another third white person has stepped up to fight the noble cause of shouting at Future Brown for sounding like they belong in a white-dominated space like a museum

Why is it so bad that this sounds like a museum piece?

You know, like it's so hip and cool and rad when Matthew Barney puts Agnostic Front/Murphy's Law guys in Cremaster Cycle or Banks Violette teams with SunnO))) or the National play in a museum for 6 hours or whatever or AnCo plays the Gug or w/e ... but someone includes TINK into a piece of art and it's like "gross, you got ART SCHOOL in my authentic ideas of what spaces black people should be in"

Do you think diplo like future brown

Likes

Why is it so bad that this sounds like a museum piece?

You know, like it's so hip and cool and rad when Matthew Barney puts Agnostic Front/Murphy's Law guys in Cremaster Cycle or Banks Violette teams with SunnO))) or the National play in a museum for 6 hours or whatever or AnCo plays the Gug or w/e ... but someone includes TINK into a piece of art and it's like "gross, you got ART SCHOOL in my authentic ideas of what spaces black people should be in"

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Friday, February 27, 2015 6:43 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hmm... booming

matt dc otm though

*hits a gong*

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Friday, 27 February 2015 18:20 (Yesterday)

lol

whiney this isn't the first time you've referred to me as white, cut it out dickface

i was eating amazing sri lankan food last night and then asleep, i've missed literally everything so feel free to send any crucial hot takes or hot tweets my way!

whiney's "no one cares" argument is very bizarre, a huge amount of the music we write about - positive and negative - has a tiny audience. also i have written many negative pieces in my time and few, ie none, of them have ended up in this brouhaha so obviously people do care

Fatima Al Qadiri's response is a bit weird though, it's like she's suggesting that because all collaborators were willingly involved in the FB project, then there's no possibility of appropriation occurring.

"gross, you got ART SCHOOL in my authentic ideas of what spaces black people should be in" - I think the point in these reviews is more like exhibition spaces are generally sterile places. I don't think it's about where black people should or shouldn't be.

also i am keeping a tally of White People Calling Me White in the wake of this and it keeps growing!

You know, like it's so hip and cool and rad when Matthew Barney puts Agnostic Front/Murphy's Law guys in Cremaster Cycle or Banks Violette teams with SunnO))) or the National play in a museum for 6 hours or whatever or AnCo plays the Gug or w/e ...

lol i don't think any of these are hip or cool or rad

whiney vs lex vs whiteness

not sure whether to cry or wind my watch

Sure, voluntary participation doesn't mean appropriation didn't take place, but if you don't have any justifiable claim to the group you say is being appropriated and co-opted from and you aren't offering dissenting opinions from people from that group, then on whose behalf are you making the accusation? With what critical authority are you making it? Without at least that, it becomes weird to be ringing the appropriation and co-option bell. Do any grime, drill, reggae, dancehall, etc. artists have opinions about Future Brown's project that we could give attention to? Do any of them feel co-opted? Like they've been used to garner street cred?

do miley cyrus's dancers have opinions about her stage performances? do they feel co-opted?

I don't even think it has to be from the grime, drill, reggae, dancehall scene of whatever. I honestly don't think FB is really worth any of those people caring about. But I do think a critic, in lex's case an established writer, has a place to make a sustained argument about the cultural politics involved which can be judged on its own merits.

In a weird way, a big part of FB and FAQ seems to involve an attempt to present meta-statements around appropriation and global network culture in the first place (some of which also seem incoherent or at least unsatisfactory at best). So it's especially strange to me that FAQ went for such a non-response regarding what might actually be at stake. Playing strategy I guess.

Ugh, don't be deliberately obtuse. There were black women who had opinions about what Miley Cyrus was doing that drove and contributed to that larger dialogue. We actually did have examples of her dancers speaking out both in support of and against her treatment of them. So yes, I am interested in what artists from those music scenes might have to say about this if they even care. A critical conversation about the appropriation or co-option of a specific group that doesn't involve the voices of the people from that group just feels like another type of co-opting.

Greer OTM as fuck

yes, of course their voices are interesting, though my point has always been the context in which those artists receive minimal attention unless they collaborate with artists with more middle-class/privileged sensibilities, but no, you don't need to be the specific person being co-opted to recognise when co-option is taking place. if you applied that to every other incidence of privilege and appropriation being called out...

i mean: i don't have to be a grime artist to recognise that america-based oil/fashion/art money selling grime back to us is co-option

or that utopian rhetoric about global boundarylessness is dangerous stuff that feeds into the myth of the internet as a great leveller

from a critic's pov, though, i found FAQ's demand that meaghan and i should have interviewed her most bizarre; since when are artists interviewed for opinion pieces or album reviews? the whole point is for the critic to respond to the art shorn of the artist's intentions.

(i'm not remotely mad that FAQ responded, ofc, artists can do what they want just like critics can do what they want, though i don't think she really got what i was criticising) (but i do think both artists and critics should at least try to maintain a semblance of a fourth wall - less chummy, more edifying)

In the cold light of day, you should have just gone "lol bass music Psyence Fiction" and left it at that.

If not meant ironically, Whiney's "a white-dominated space like a museum" is extremely revealing given we're talking about self-consciously globalised music here. Like, which museums? In any case it strikes me that the argument primarily is about class here.

Like, when Prokofiev's grandson* started producing grime beats, no one particularly cared, partly because of the vibrancy of what was going on elsewhere in the scene but also because no one suddenly elevated him as the scene's big genius or made any grandiose conceptual claims on his part.

Either way if this had been a collection of undeniable bangers or indeed had been particularly musically interesting at all, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. (Actually, we might, given the arguments that were leveled at MIA or even someone like The Bug, but people would be taking different sides). It doesn't sound particularly forward-looking to these ears, although it has all the signifiers of being so, I feel like I've heard everything here before, like a decade before in some cases.

On the other hand, I dunno, maybe Timberlee or Riko are grateful for the (even slightly) expanded audience here. Or even the paycheck.

*This fact is still ridiculous to me.

Maybe the problem here is that Lex and Future Brown are essentially the same kind of people, with a similar agenda/love regarding black popular music, except one is working within the field of critical journalism, and the others are working at the intersection of music/art/fashion. Maybe they have a different ideology about how to go about this, assuming the album did bang (it doesnt) what would it be for outsiders to work with these artists in a non-appropriative way? Also, is it appropriation for an established journalist to champion scenes from which they are somehow alien demographically to further their career?

xxposts - sorry, lex!

Also, is it appropriation for an established journalist to champion scenes from which they are somehow alien demographically to further their career?

― Josephine, Saturday, 28 February 2015 12:48 (4 hours ago) Permalink

what kind of mind-reading shit is this? if lex likes tink he's welcome to write about tink, i dont think u have to get presumptive about his motives

likewise future brown are welcome to collab w/ tink assuming they can make good music with tink (they did not)

fwiw i am of the mind that meta-criticism is p boring to anyone but non critics so kind of align w/ chris on the overarching if not the specifics ... i mean i cosigned lex's argument but have a super-passing familiarity with this group's whole ideological schtick, if he & m overreached in their portrayal of FB's expressed thesis—which, btw, is I think why she mentioned not being interviewed by either one, that they were assigning the group a thesis that they had not expressed, it wasn't like 'you should have interviewed me,' it was like, 'did i SAY that i think [x]'...—nyway, if he & m overreached in their portrayal of FB's thesis, if they attributed the critical noise around them to the group itself w/out carefully delineating the two, then that's on them to a degree, or something they should be watching out for ... nb this group is bad & we all *know* there's something like this as an underpinning to their bad music bc otherwise they would try to compete on Tink et al's actual terrain, but they can't so they dont ...

worldclash aesthetics are a poison & the real damage wrought by the hollerboard over the past x years ...

fwiw future brown are one of the few acts this year I've been asked about irl

It's exactly the kind of middle brow shit that pops off among ppl who think they are too smart for pop music but don't care enough to spend time listening to music and it'll get even worse if a meme of their being suppressed by outsiders takes on steam

ILM = the kind of middle brow crit that pops off among critics who think they're too smart for art school but don't care enough to spend time making art

^^^OTM

Writing is art, art school is a sham

also lots of ilxors make amazing art

Tweets are music

Simon Reynolds tweet · Feb 27
stunned to totally agree with (Lex)critique of Future Brown ... noting also echoes of MIA controversy of yore

Kind of hilarious that Simon is explicitly reminding people that he wrote "don't let the brown skin fool you" about M.I.A. in Lex's defense

Browns of Future Passed

For all the arty/ideological trappings, the foofaraw still boils down to the old "you don't get it"/"I do get it, I just don't like it" divide. Of course FAQ thinks the writers should talk to her, because of course she thinks they just don't understand -- like every artist who's ever gotten a bad review. (NB: Sometimes the artists are right! But in this case, Lex's work seems a lot more nuanced and well thought out than FB's.)

I think the only reason FAQ mentioned not being interviewed by Lex was the fact that he makes a whole series a malicious assertions about her contacts/friends/money/concepts which are unsubstantiated in the article. Not because she wanted to explain the project to him so he 'got it'. Also, the money for the project would have come from Warp, no? I wonder if Warp insisted the article be taken down? If they heavily invested in this project, then that would be in their interest. Anyway, I wonder when the authenticity police will actually realize they are all dead, and that they should probably either quit, or actually speak to the so called victims of appropriation and ask them whether they feel appropriated.

Anyway, I like the idea that Lex was infact employed by Warp to create some clever inverse marketing strategy. Lex, you are a great writer - why do you have to drench all your polemics in some much cuntyness? Usually it just detracts from the valid arguments you are (sometimes) making.

Tell me about your mother.

I don't think someone actually has to know or say they've been exploited to have been exploited

Sure but doesn't that make the cunty assertions of journalists untestable?

One thing I don't get wrt "co-option" is how this hurts artists who get featured credits. There's nothing sneaky about the process, no unacknowledged biting of other scenes. Guest spots are a two-way street and the MCs on the FB record are reaching people they wouldn't otherwise have reached at this stage. Presumably they liked the beats (that makes one of us) and wanted to MC over them. I'm struggling to see why this is worse in principle than any other record that uses guest spots.

The interaction of artists with the theory-heavy realm of music critics is a tricky realm. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't thing -- once someone like FAQ responds to questions about motivation and artistic reckoning in an interview, or acknowledges any sort of philosophical stance it opens the door to legitimizing the kind of meta-critical analysis of lex's article. It'll happen regardless, but the more artists encourage or are even complacent in these meta narratives the more likely it is that this criticism of gulf between the music and the promise of whatever story has been cooked up will take place.

A few years ago I was at a public interview session between a journalist definitely engaged in the artistic narrative and a musician who was not having it and it was hilariously awkward. All of the questions implying a metatextual narrative fell flat when the answers were to the effect of "I like these sounds and I feel the images work well with it" when explaining a live performance.

I love the idea of stories about music but I think it's really a plague.

a whole series a malicious assertions about her contacts/friends/money/concepts which are unsubstantiated in the article.

What are these unsubstantiated assertions? It's not especially clear to me from FAQ's response, in fact she claims that "The article and its theory contain more contradictions than there is space to address", so it's difficult to figure out what's going on here.

Rereading Lex's piece, this seems to be the big assumption: "This art scene from which Future Brown emerged is one centred around its belief in cultural accelerationism – a kitsch sub-branch of Marxist philosophy that says “the only way to get over capital is through capital”." FB have never talked about that and the quote about the video, "an exercise in capitalist surrealism", comes from an art museum, not the band. It's guilt by association. The rest of the piece seems pretty watertight to me.

this seems like a far cry from Diplo-esque co-option. that would be more like sampling or emulating a regional style, selling it to a larger audience while giving little or no credit to the artists & culture that originated it, and then moving on to the next hot sound.

from what i know about FB's project it sounds a lot closer to the ethical way to do things (direct collaboration, etc).

Yes. Asking "Do you want to appear on our record with a featured artist credit?" doesn't sound like co-option to me. The dictionary definition says "to include someone in something, often against their will"

Diplo is zero-theory, no examination, "does it bang" imo. If it's danceable then he plays it out until he thinks it's not hot, then goes on to the next thing. Doesn't care about context or culture or w/e other than to the extent sounds from around the world are new territory to mine.

this seems like a far cry from Diplo-esque co-option. that would be more like sampling or emulating a regional style, selling it to a larger audience while giving little or no credit to the artists & culture that originated it, and then moving on to the next hot sound.

from what i know about FB's project it sounds a lot closer to the ethical way to do things (direct collaboration, etc).

― lil urbane (Jordan), Monday, 2 March 2015 16:40 (57 minutes ago) Permalink

sure, but end result of fb effort, to me, ends up coming off as 2015 exotica

or like mid 90s exotica with some 2015 engineering

maybe so (i still haven't listened to the LP), but that's a different criticism than appropriation.

x-post--so you don't believe in collaborations, or you think FB does too many, or the album sound is "exotica" to you merely because of utilizing the genres it does, in the manner it does?

xp hey man I just wandered into the thread wanting to post, I'm not really posting about anything being talked about

when I last posted about diplo here, I guess I just thought to myself that this would be a good thread to post the word diplo

haha

Rereading Lex's piece, this seems to be the big assumption: "This art scene from which Future Brown emerged is one centred around its belief in cultural accelerationism – a kitsch sub-branch of Marxist philosophy that says “the only way to get over capital is through capital”." FB have never talked about that and the quote about the video, "an exercise in capitalist surrealism", comes from an art museum, not the band. It's guilt by association. The rest of the piece seems pretty watertight to me.

Perhaps, but then FAQ's stuff has also been put out on Hyperdub by Steve Goodman, who was a student of Nick Land's at Warwick during the original CCRU accelerationist era. I'm sure FAQ is familiar that stuff, I don't know whether or not FB is explicitly supposed to be an accelerationist album as an authorial or artistic statement, but it can be easily read as such imo. And Lex does a decent job at quickly demonstrating that in his review.

she's had music put out on a number of labels and attributing that motive to her but not, say, the teklife guys seems suspect

I'm not saying Lex can't read it in that way, only that I can see why FAQ rejects that reading, because it's a supposition based on who she hangs out with rather than anything she's said.

Fair enough, we can agree to disagree, but I think the aesthetics of her work resonates strongly with the 'ironic' fixation on processes of 'deterritorialization' in accelerationist theory. I think that's why she got taken up by Hyperdub, ditto Teklife, but the situation is obviously very different for both those cases. I'd add as well that it's not just about hanging out, it's about having your work 'framed' by that label. And I don't think she's so naive to not be aware of the conceptual and political aspects of the Hyperdub project.

Also, I'm curious, why do you think she rejects that reading?

I don't know. I don't know her. You've read the same Facebook statement as I have. But I don't hear that theory at work in the FB record and I haven't read it in interviews so I guess she's annoyed it's being assigned to her. Personally I dgaf about theory in dance music.

Me either really. Or at least certain kinds of theorizing. But you know, Goodman's writing books like this on MIT Press: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/sonic-warfare - so it's also kinda hard to ignore at a certain point...

So far I've been able to enjoy Hyperdub and Kode9 without reading "a transdisciplinary micropolitics of frequency that breaks with the orthodoxies of phenomenology and cultural studies and triumphantly succeeds in immersing us in the present of viral capitalism, pirate media, and asymmetric warfare." Hope I'm not missing out.

*nods*

I just think there's a difference between Asiatisch, which came bristling with theory (and kind of needs it) and Future Brown, which sounds like fairly straightforward (though disappointingly bland) genre-hopping.

he kind of keeps his work slotted into different academic/musical/conceptual slots, though

there are different approaches to the whole music/theory/story interplay -- artists can have a stated agenda/conceptual project and do work that may or may not fit in that box, but writers often extrapolate trends or philosophies that musicians may or may not care about.

Artists creating stories around their work is one thing, writers positing theory and philosophy about art is another. This is kind of assuming that since an artist has worked in one realm, all of their work can be measured by that rubric which is mixing and matching.

sorry, that was an xpost

Yeah, I get that. But was surprised recently to discover that Spaceape was partners with Luciana Parisi. That scene is really tight!

oh word, I have her book

Yeah, and she was at Warwick back in the day as well, along with Matt Fuller and Mark Fisher...

Anyway, this kind of mapping is maybe sounding a bit weird now. The point is that I think there are those connections and strong links to accelerationism. It's not so far fetched or unsubstantiated.

i think part of the problem here is that criticizing the art can easily slip into criticizing the critics who like that art if you're not careful

dont know enough about the situation to say whether lex did that or not but ...

do they like that art... or do they like writing about the art?

the rabbit holes

The lex peice is more engaged with how the Future Brown album has been received by a certain segment of the pop music press than it is with either the art-conceptual framework (which still gets a fair amount of attention) or the music itself (basically a dismissive footnote). In other words, it's par for the critic's course: "You're all paying attention to the wrong things." The lex has seen the incurious and self-congratulatory interconnections that reduce so much pop of the pop press to the rote chewing of a shared cud and must forevermore fight the power.

That isn't such a bad vantage from which to launch a politically-minded critique, but nor are the qualities that help make Future Brown's art so interesting to dilettante tastemakers bad things in themselves ("from privileged backgrounds, fluent in the promotional use of art-speak"). I don't outright love the album, but nor do I see it as some regrettable exercise in forced exotica and greedy cultural appropriation. However high-minded the framing, the producers are pretty much just making pop music and using vocalists whose work they presumably enjoy to achieve that.

The problem, more than anything else, is that their pop instincts are rather dull. "Vernaculo" and "Talkin' Bands" are excellent, but that's more a product of the vocalist's work than the production, which tends to a tepid glassiness.

^ BANDZ, lol

To the extent the album works, it does so because it's so entirely dominated by its vocalists. Since nearly every moment is dominated and defined by a different singer or rapper, Future Brown has a lot of moment-to-moment textural appeal. And while the backing tracks aren't all that immediately exciting taken on their own, at their best they at least tend to serve and flatter the vocals. Some, like "MVP" and "Asbestos", fall distinctly flat, and several more seem more like lazy pastiche than the product of a distinct sensibility, but the run from "Bandz" through "Dangerzone" is pretty solid. If, yeah, uninspired.

i think part of the problem here is that criticizing the art can easily slip into criticizing the critics who like that art if you're not careful

OTM. That way lies Armond White.

TTM:006 MA NGUZU

https://soundcloud.com/tobago-tracks/ttm006-ma-nguzu

Enjoying this genre-hopping mix of stuff, Meaghan Garvey mentioned it in her Pitchfork review and have only followed it up this week.

Annoying Fade to Mind producer quote from article "L.A. record label Fade to Mind looks to expand its cultural reach"

http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-83234482/

We may have missed some opportunities because we want to control everything,” Rubin said. “Our brand’s really complicated, it’s not just a bunch of boys in hats playing trap music. But we’ve always been influenced by pop music, and if someone came to us to do a Britney record, of course we would try it.”

Elysia Crampton's American Drift is really scratching the itch for me that the Future Brown album failed to.

lol I forgot about lex vs FAQ high-quality stuff

lol yah prime filet mignon for those w/ long memories

i regret nothing except not doing it to pc music as well due to lack of time/unwillingness to endure their output

all things considered i think future brown is happily on course to be the turkey of the decade

yeah that's why i think pc music might have been more worthwhile to go in on

did anyone write anything on ilm about the fatima al qadiri album, brute? finally listening to it now

as far as I can tell it's just completely normal faq instrumental music content with little news clip samples occasionally at the beginnings of tracks, for uh, conceptual reasons?

asiatisch was much better

*hits a gong*

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Friday, 27 February 2015 18:20 (two years ago) Permalink

classic thread! also, good interview in pitchfork

critic Isabelia Herrera twweeted her fave 2023 albums on Spotify so far and included Fatima Al Qadiri's Gumar ep

What I heard of Medieval Femme sounded great tho maybe more to admire than something I'd go to repeatedly.

Someone did a video edit of the strikingly eerie 'Malaak' over clips from the Dune remake and it did work all too well.