Fatima Al Qadiri - 9/10

Fatimia Al Qadri’s extraordinary debut album ‘Asiatisch’ marked her as a creator of eerie, minimal sound design. The Kuwaiti-born, US-baised polymath is an accomplished visual artist with a history of confronting stereotypes, and on ‘Brute’ she’s concerned with challenging authority.

The music is often oppressive: rhythms jerk at unnatural angles, beats drop like gas canisters and scattered soundbites provide commentary like a CNN news report. But despite the cold, dystopian visions of songs such as ‘Battery’, there are still shafts of light that pierce the chaos, like the digital harps of ‘Fragmentation’. It’s reminiscent of that doyenne of experimental electronica, Laurie Anderson – and that’s a heck of a compliment.

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