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

!

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