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

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.