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

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.