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

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.