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

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