Fatima Al Qadiri – Asiatisch

Artist: Fatima Al Qadiri
Title Of Album: Asiatisch
Year Of Release: mar 2014
Label: Hyperdub / HDBCD024
Genre: Bass
Quality: MP3
Bitrate: 320 kbps
Total Time: 00:37:48
Total Size: 87 mb

Tracklist:
01. Shanzhai (for Shanzhai Biennial) feat. Helen Feng
02. Szechuan
03. Wudang
04. Loading Beijing
05. Hainan Island
06. Shenzhen
07. Dragon Tattoo
08. Forbidden City
09. Shanghai Freeway
10. Jade Stars

Fatima Al Qadiri is a multidisciplinary artist and musician from Kuwait. In just a few years, she’s quickly built a reputation as a conceptual artist, exploring themes informed both by her own background and global pop culture, through a number of highly acclaimed EP’s, multimedia projects and writings. She’s also a founding member of the production team ‘Future Brown’. Fatima’s debut album is called ‘Asiatisch’, and as the track titles suggest, the record provides a simulated road trip through an imagined China. Musically, the album is a homage to that quietly influential sub-strain of grime, often loosely termed ‘sinogrime’, due to its preoccupation with Asian motifs and melodies, and pioneered by the likes of Wiley and Jammer at the beginning of the 2000s in East London.

‘Asiatisch’ is a provocation which asks more questions than it answers. The title is the German word for Asian. Unlike its title, however, the music on ‘Asiatisch’ revolves around the fantasies of east Asia as refracted through pulpy Western pop culture, in particular, Hollywood, literary fiction, music, cartoons and advertising. Fatima asks what is meant by the term ‘Asian’ in a digital age of viral interchange and the hi-speed trading of cultural bytes, the concept of ‘shanzhai’ proves pivotal, a term whose meaning stems from a wild, out of control zone of banditry, but which has come to be used to refer to the Chinese counterfeiting of Western brands and goods. While this ‘sinogrime’ has had many copyists over the last few years, ‘Asiatisch’ is really the first record that attempts to articulate this weird complex of sonic interchanges between the West and China. With the exception of the opening track, ‘Shanzhai’, a haunting cover of ‘Nothing Compares to You’ with nonsensical Mandarin lyrics, and the shimmering ‘Loading Beijing’, ‘Wudang’ and ‘Jade Stairs’ which sample and distort classical Chinese poetry staging an epic confrontation between China’s ancient soul and the onslaught of the industrial factory machine, most of the tracks blend mallets, bells, gongs, flutes, steel drums and choral atmospherics with the searing synth-brass and the skittering drums of grime, playing melodies that are inflected as much by classic R&B as to synthetic versions of traditional Chinese music. On “Dragon Tattoo” for example, stereotypical iconography of imagined China is slotted into a threatening, robotic R&B format. The carefree pirating of Western brands blurs into a soft-synth pirating of Chinese musical signs. ‘Asiatisch’ is lovingly wrapped in pristine artwork by Babak Radboy from Shanzhai Biennial, and the music was given a 3D sheen by in demand mixer Lexxx. Proclaiming both its love of both ancient and imagined China, ‘Asiatisch’ is a rare album that is both icily beautiful and conceptually layered.