Atmospheres of rage and control: Fatima Al Qadiri on 'Brute'

Fatima Al Qadiri is back with new album 'Brute'. It's her second full length for Hyperdub (following 2014's 'Asiatisch') and sees her explore themes such as Occupy Wall Street, totalitarian regimes and the affectivity of sound design and sampling in consumable music.

The Kuwait-raised, Berlin-based artist is a singular and curious mind in contemporary electronic music, moving through the academic and the experimental.

Acting as a contributing editor for DIS Magazine, she helmed the Global .Wav radio blog in which she sifted through the depths of the internet for the world’s most intriguing, little-heard sounds, while her collaborations with the Gulf Arab GCC art collective positioned her in the art world where she, along with her cohort, redefined the group exhibition format.

Early releases for UNO and Fade To Mind contained dancefloor-testing grime experiments, with her sound more recently unfurling into something abstracted and wholly her own, as heard on both albums for Hyperdub (as well as in the palette of Future Brown, the group she's in alongside Nguzunguzu and J-Cush).

Al Qadiri’s approach to sound has always posited context and history as a highly necessary component, and ‘Brute’ makes these touchstones more immediate, as recordings and sound objects interact with her own production.

‘Asiatisch' placed world building at the fore, constructing an imagined China that emerged out of Al Qadiri's own speculations of futuristic aesthetics in the East. But ‘Brute’ is set firmly in the present and the real, standing as a deeply personal critique of structures that confine, whether they be governmental or musical.

With her latest LP dropping next week, Mixmag's Deforrest Brown caught up with Al Qadiri to discuss the political roots of her latest record and the casual way in which we take in and participate in events of the world.

Exclusive Q+A and premiere of new track 'Power' below.

Note: 'Power' features the voice of Sgt Cheryl Dorsey, a retired LAPD Sargent, speaker, freelance writer and sought-after police expert. She enlightens and empowers audiences with her candid and honest approach to surviving police encounters

What drew you to this idea of the 'Brute'?

Brute is a kind of counterpoint to the word thug, and how people over the last two years have been speaking about thugs in the media. I wanted to title the record accordingly.

I feel like the two moods, the atmospheres of rage and despair, are not things that you gingerly step into. You’re kind of overwhelmed by them. When I’m in a really, really fragile state of mind I end up making music. I think I make music in really extreme situations like when I’m really elated or when I’m really down.

I had a knee injury last year. I was stuck in bed for a month, and I couldn’t walk. I was just reading Twitter all the time and following a bunch of activists. When you have an injury time stops, so you can really explore things in that time when you don’t have to hustle. The knee injury just made me pause. When I started writing material, part of the feeling was from my own temporary state of disability, then I started coming out.

I’ve equated the record to the casual streaming of news that you just referred to. There’s a weirdly passive involvement with this news that’s happening elsewhere.

I think it’s like anything. Back in the day when you were reading a newspaper you still felt helpless, you know? It’s something I’ve wanted to make a work about for a long time; about this fragile state of perceived democracy.

There is a perceived state of democracy coming from the non-Western world. America is always literally being sold to us as the promised land. I feel like this stuff has been really ingrained in me. My parents were both political activists. I was raised in an atmosphere where democracy was like this holy grail. Then when I got here, [America] I realized that that holy grail is like a fake alien body or something that you’re looking at on an operating table. It’s not real, it’s an idea.

So many things were coming together. There’s intersectionality in the subject matter. We’ve seen many, many, many times before the state’s relationship to citizens. It’s like a different fabric. It hasn’t changed. I’ve been reading [Michelle Alexander's book] The New Jim Crow and it's cementing everything that I thought was real, but with real facts and figures. Part of Ferguson was about that. I’m just one of many who has made a record about the subject of protest; I’m not the first and I’m not the last.

It’s funny how art can urge us to get these types of feelings out. There’s a really archival nature to ‘Brute’. What sort of research did you do? Or was it more of a collection from your casual scrolling?

I wanted to use more audio samples, but the more that I looked into it, the more I felt torn about which ones to use.

Were you looking for a sense of affectivity or context from the samples?

Not even. It’s just things that I found inspiring. It’s mostly about the samples being revealing of something.

What about the titles? They are quite precise.

I feel like if I were to give titles that were too abstract, that would make it more artful. It's unnecessary. ‘Brute’ is not a record about fantasy; it is one about reality. That’s why I felt that I had to give the most basic, literal and unambiguous sort of words. Maybe ‘Oubliette’ is the most foreign looking title, but it’s a kind of medieval French dungeon. The reason why I like it so much is because it contains the words ‘to forget’ and ‘prison’. The carceral state is this place where beings are cryogenically frozen, stuck in this place where time has no function.

Yeah, it’s not just a physical place, it’s quite psychic, too.

Maybe that’s why so many prisoners turn to spirituality in prison, because their time becomes functionless. Seeking higher power can make that okay. We’re just so conditioned as human beings to value time. The closest I’ve felt to that was during the invasion [in Kuwait]. There were no schools, no hospitals, no banks. You just woke up everyday thinking, “How will I survive? Will I make it home okay?” I feel like people in that kind of state know that they are going to survive within a specific set of parameters.

I felt really claustrophobic listening to the record with all of the specific sounds that you chose from the walkie-talkie bleeps to sirens or even just vocal clips.

I definitely wanted that. I really hope that before I kick the bucket I get to make a film soundtrack. It sounds corny, but I want to create a world and set you into a context. And it’s a very unpleasant one.

Seems like you proposing a more pragmatic space instead of fantasy.

I think a lot of my life is actually conditioned by the notion of control. I’ve been obsessed with this since I was a little girl. It manifests here in a very socio-political way. I think you’ll really be able to delineate this notion of control once I have a larger body of work.

Through your own production you’re able to work your way through these experiences. ‘Brute’ in that way seems to deal a lot with the sound and architecture of that confined space. There’s a real physicality to the work that brings me to think of how [grime subgenre] sinogrime has been related to your work at points. Was that an influence here?

The interesting thing about sinogrime is that it was never defined while it was being made, it was defined after the fact. [Hyperdub boss] Kode9 coined it. I think music can exist in a number of ways and then be defined much later when you can gather and denote a pattern of some kind. I think you can make a case for sinogrime having existed because it is a motif.

For your cover you used a Josh Kline sculpture from his exhibition, Freedom. I saw the sculpture in person at the New Museum’s Triennial and was really disturbed by it.

I had been involved with that work. The Barack Obama video in the show had music that I had written for it. It was a version of The Star-Spangled Banner that I did specifically for the piece. So I was already very intimate with the work even before it was unveiled to the public. I actually saw it in person when it was installed at the New Museum in May, and I had already been writing the record for about two or three months. When I saw Josh I was like, “Josh, I need to use this Teletubby for my record cover."

It seems like every aspect of the record is entangled in this struggle between political systems and everyday living. Do you feel like art can be effective in politics and life?

That’s a hard question because I think about how the art is not just perceived but related to the audience. I’ve been influenced by a number of works in my life, and I feel like it depends on contact, access and knowledge. What’s most revealing about any kind of art is if it delves into a historical narrative. The more I learn about history, the more the shit that happens today makes sense to me. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s partially about educating the listener about the subject at hand. I can say that art has affected me, but I do feel like it can. Though there’s no definitive answer.

'Brute' is out March4 via Hyperdub

Deforrest Brown is Mixmag's East Coast Editor. Follow him on Twitter here