Fatima Al Qadiri

Senegal-born, Kuwait-raised, and New York City-residing visual artist and producer Fatima Al Qadiri pulls together a heady blend of personal and political geographies. As a child, she experienced the Gulf War firsthand with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait – a trauma that was furthered by her love for video games, and playing the Gulf War-glorifying Desert Strike video game barely two years after she saw her native Kuwait destroyed. Memory is a crucial element to how she melts music down into her own hyper-digital, often beatless landscapes: her 2014 debut LP on Hyperdub, Asiatisch, presents a Western view of China through experimental grime productions.

In her 2014 Red Bull Music Academy lecture, she recounted her unique personal history and talked about how she re-frames seemingly disparate sounds and ideas.

Hosted by Lauren Martin Transcript:

Lauren Martin

Please help me welcome, Fatima Al Qadiri.

[applause]

Looking absolutely resplendent in that jacket, by the way. We’re going to start today with a video and some music and hopefully, you could tell us a story behind it. Let’s hope this works.

(music: excerpt from The Musical Anthology Of The Arabian Peninsula)

Can you give us a little bit of story about that particular kind of music and what it means to you?

Fatima Al Qadiri

This is music of the pearl divers from a record called The Musical Anthology of the Arabian Peninsula and my grandfather was a singer on a pearl-diving boat and this is the kind of music that he performed for a living. Pearl diving was the main economy in Kuwait before oil was found and it was a very medieval occupation involving a lot of death, of course, because not everyone would come back alive from diving and the role of the naham, who was the singer on the boat, he was the only person who didn’t dive but still being on sea for a six month journey wasn’t exactly luxurious. As you can see from some of the images on the video, there were wooden boats, the men wore cloths and rags and used nose pegs or clothes pegs as...

Lauren Martin

Yeah, almost like a chain around the back as well.

Fatima Al Qadiri

That was their technology for diving, and this genre is called “Music of the Sea,” and it’s just to illustrate Kuwait’s kind of medieval past and its folk music. I come from a musical heritage. My grandfather was a singer even though music was considered a very lowly occupation.

Lauren Martin

Why so? Because a lot of times in the West, the role of the artist is quite exalted and romantic, but it probably wasn’t like that from the way you’re describing it.

Fatima Al Qadiri

I think music was still seen – unless it was classical music, folk music and pop music in the past was still considered lowly. It wasn’t a prestigious occupation. You are a performer for hire and in the Arab world for sure, it wasn’t something to be proud of. You almost had to conceal it. In the case of my grandfather, in the ‘50s or ‘60s Kuwait TV decided to document the folk music of the country and they came to him as renowned naham, which is a singer of sea music, but he renounced the documentation as television was a form of satanism in his eyes, which it just goes to... and he died before I was born so I never met him. I never met the musician in my family or the musical figurehead in my family, and I think that he would definitely disapprove of me being a musician, also being a woman producing music as [it being] just not okay in his eyes.

Lauren Martin

When it comes to the role of the family in that respect, what do you think the zones of the kind of music that he was making and singing, how do you think that had an impact on you as a child? Because you’ve never met him, obviously, his legacy has stayed with you in that kind of music.

Fatima Al Qadiri

I mean, my father, even though he never made any music, was a huge listener and had a large record collection and he played Kuwaiti folk music quite often and wasn’t shy of his father’s occupation even though some families would denounce their elder’s relationship to music. I mean, for prestige reasons or et cetera because it wasn’t a respectable profession. And even the word “artist” in Arabic, I had a very funky experience recently where I entered Lebanon and you have to put your occupation in Arabic and I wrote “fanana,” which means female artist and the man in immigration asked me if I was a dancer, which is, you know...

Lauren Martin

A stripper, basically.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Stripper.

Lauren Martin

Yeah.

Fatima Al Qadiri

I was like, “Do I look like a stripper?” [laughs] Basically, a female artist, it has a lot of negative meanings. Yeah.

Lauren Martin

For a girl or Arab woman, you’re up against quite a lot in the structures of what you do right now?

Fatima Al Qadiri

Especially for production. Production is pretty much 100% dudes. I have yet to meet a woman from the Gulf that produces music professionally. I’m sure there’s girls that want to. There’s a lot of women in classical Arabic music. There’s a lot of women singing and performing but writing is a different story. But I don’t work in the Kuwaiti music industry, I don’t have to deal with them. [laughs]

Lauren Martin

When you’re speaking about the generations of music from your family, when it gets to your father, you said that he was a big listener. I know we’ve got an example a lot of people will recognize but not probably the context that you remember it. Let’s see if we can find this.

Fatima Al Qadiri

There it is.

Lauren Martin

Yeah, there it is, right. Do you want to just give us a little bit of a preface to this?

Fatima Al Qadiri

I think we should play it first.

Aram Khachaturian– “Sabre Dance”

(music: Aram Khachaturian – “Sabre Dance”)

Fatima Al Qadiri

Everybody pretty much knows this from every like Looney Tunes cartoon around but my father randomly was doing graduate school in Moscow in the ‘70s and working at the Kuwaiti embassy at the same time. The Kuwaiti ambassador in Moscow fancied himself as being a composer and was taking composition classes from this guy who is Khachaturian. One of the renowned Russian composers of the 20th century and my father became obsessed with the Russian classical music because of his meetings with Khachaturian and his employer at the time. Growing up, he was constantly blasting Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov or Khachaturian and other Russian composers because I think that he felt more Western classical composers that Russian classical music had an Eastern vibe to it and an Eastern melody and more relatable to Arabs, and I think that’s how I got into classical music because of his obsession.

Lauren Martin

Interestingly, your obsession with classical music as a child actually managed to inform one your other young loves, which was video games.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Yeah.

Lauren Martin

Do you have a preference for something that we could play that would nicely illustrate this extra-generational jump?

Fatima Al Qadiri

Actually, while I was researching for the gig tomorrow night, I noticed that quite a few of the 8-bit soundtracks were actually re-purposed classical pieces. There’s a lot of original classical music in early video games but I wouldn’t be able to pluck one. Does anyone have one off the top of their head? No?

Lauren Martin

They aren’t quite as knowledgeable as you but there is one that we could play for the preface on Kuwaiti television when you were a child.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Oh, but that’s cartoons. You’re talking about video games.

Lauren Martin

Yes. Actually, this is probably a nice segue into how you use classical music. That was my fault. Thanks, Fatima.

Fatima Al Qadiri

[laughs] I think this maybe needs a preface, the Japanese cartoons. Basically, in the ‘80s Kuwait TV decided to dub some ‘70s Japanese cartoons into Arabic in Lebanon. They were taken from Japan, paid for by Kuwait, dubbed in Lebanon and they changed the theme music and they dubbed everything Arabic and it’s fascinating. This is one of my early childhood memories, seeing these Japanese cartoons and just being exposed to this completely alien culture, let’s say. It was my first interaction with manga or anime or whatever you want to call it, but this is just to illustrate how different the opening music is from the Japanese version to the Arabic version.

Lauren Martin

This is the Japanese one first.

Tokimeki Tonight opening theme

(music / video: Tokimeki Tonight opening theme)

Fatima Al Qadiri

The name of this cartoon in Japanese is Tokimeki Tonight. In Arabic, it was dubbed as Ranzi Asahera, which is, “Ranzi the witch.”

(music / video: Ranzi Asahera title track)

[sings] Ranzi... [laughs] But just to show you, I mean I thought that since I’m in Japan, I want to illustrate this Japanese / Kuwaiti connection, which happened very, very early in my youth and I have no idea who was at Kuwait TV, who thought, “Yes, we absolutely need to spend this much money fucking dubbing these cartoons.” [laughs] They weren’t even dubbed in Kuwait, they were dubbed in Lebanon. These are Lebanese singers and Lebanese voice actors that were doing these. It was just a major production for an alien... I don’t get it but I thank the person from the bottom of my heart that was responsible for this.

Lauren Martin

Watching these cartoons, almost different levels removed from the original source, which would have been Japan. How did that affect your understanding of sound and visuals and how they work together through language because it’s become such a facet of your work as a producer?

Fatima Al Qadiri

I think when you’re a kid you just take it for granted. You’re like, “Oh, yeah. These weird things just exist.” I think as you get older year by year, you question like, “Wait, why is this Japanese cartoon on Kuwaiti TV?” Just with every year, this became more intriguing, and obviously, me and my younger sister – my younger sister lived in Japan for 10 years. This really affected her. She went to a university here and she really pursued it. I got lazy and went to the States. [laughs] But I think that exposure to a Japanese narrative, let’s say these cartoons are narratives, also the stories are so weird. This is a story about a girl who is a shapeshifter. Her father’s a vampire. Her mother is a werewolf. It’s just completely at odds with what’s happening in Kuwaiti society at the time, which was extremely conservative. There was some risque scenes. It was just really incredible that we had access to that.

Lauren Martin

There’s one more. We’re quite heavy on the videos, but I think the visual components of these sounds are so important to understand what Fatima does as an artist overall. There’s one more that links quite closely to your upbringing of listening to classical music, which was a cartoon. We spoke about that one earlier.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Lauren Martin

This one is Japanese, it’s not Japanese, what’s the background?

Fatima Al Qadiri

No. Maybe someone in the audience can tell us, but I think it’s Italian.

Lauren Martin

Do we have any Italians in the room that could maybe tell us? Oh, we do, great. Okay, maybe we get some help here.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Let me know, guys. Unlock the secret.

Lauren Martin

Strangely, I recognize the sound to this, but I never knew what it was, too. Of course, I don’t have an ad blocker but yeah, I suppose in the five seconds, we could pretend this isn’t happening.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Okay, yes. Okay, okay.

[music / video: unknown cartoon title track]

Fatima Al Qadiri

This was like the beautiful marriage between animation and classical music. For me, I saw it around the same time as the Japanese cartoons and listening to Russian classical music. I was like, “Yes, this all makes sense.”

Lauren Martin

Which is insane because it’s all so disparate but as a child, it made sense to you. What do you mean by “made sense”?

Fatima Al Qadiri

I mean, it’s just the connection. Being exposed to animation and classical music together, you know? And, I don’t know, there was also this futuristic element of it.

Lauren Martin

Especially, with that one.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Definitely with that one. [laughs] This is one of my very earliest childhood memories is watching this video and just scurrying up to the screen and being distraught when it was over.

Lauren Martin

To give a sense of a time frame when you were in Kuwait as a child, watching all this, what is the kind of chronology for you up until, for example, the invasion?

Fatima Al Qadiri

I’m born in ‘81 and the invasion was 1990, this is happening from ‘81 to, I mean, actually that’s not accurate. From ‘81 to ‘83, I was born in the Senegal, I was born in Dakar, ‘83 is when we went to Kuwait. From that time onwards, we were in Kuwait.

Lauren Martin

A lot of what we’re speaking about right now is the experience of watching cartoons and listening to music and playing video games, but it’s all a very indoor experience as a child. Could you develop upon your experience growing up Kuwait just before the invasion and how the invasion really changed that?

Fatima Al Qadiri

There is some indoor... The invasion is when it gets 100% indoor, but before the invasion, no. If you’re a kid, if you’re a girl under the age of 10, it’s okay for you to wander the streets. Over the age of 10, it’s not okay for you to wander the streets, but even the streets, it’s just sand. You’re not losing out. [laughs] You’re not missing much out there. It was kind of like a sensory overload because Kuwait was very safe at the time. We had almost a negligible crime rate. Every time there was a robbery or something, there was one page in the paper for crime. The entire national crime fit on one page in the newspaper, it was so negligible. Yeah, I think I was just constantly consuming visual and musical information from both my parents and whoever was the comptroller of Kuwait TV deserves flowers for life from me. I don’t know who that person is.

Lauren Martin

When it came to the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, things massively changed in Kuwait and completely changed your life and with that the experience of the invasion directly influenced you starting to produce music. Could you give us a little bit of a background with that before we perhaps play a track to illustrate it?

Fatima Al Qadiri

The invasion happened in August 2nd, 1990. It was the very end of the summer and also being a kid, you’re very selfish. You don’t want the summer to end. When your parents were like, “We’ve been invaded.” Also, the idea of invasion is so foreign and I didn’t know what it meant. I’d never heard it before. Me and younger sister were like, “Great, no school. Wow, this is awesome.” [laughs] It was just like woo! We were so happy. I mean, just day by the day, we were like, “Oh fuck!” But the first, I would say months, it was awesome.

Lauren Martin

What did you do?

Fatima Al Qadiri

We just continued. It was just the summer didn’t end. I think I’m very lucky, extremely lucky that me and my younger sibling were so young and we could just fill our time with playing with toys and playing video games and whatever but my oldest sister was 13 and it was just a complete different experience for her. But it just became more insular because we had to be indoors all the time because there were soldiers on every block and our habit for playing video games began but it just became more, I mean, what could our parents do? We were just inside the whole time. We had to fill our time with shit. [laughs]

Lauren Martin

Your parents as well, they’re both had very important roles in their own ways.

Fatima Al Qadiri

They were working for the resistance. They’re like, “Yeah, yeah. Just play video games. Do whatever the fuck you want. We’re doing this thing.” My father tried to give us an Arabic lesson a day but we were so not having it. We were just like, “Uh, no way.” Which I thank him for his attempt for doing that but there was no school.

Lauren Martin

Also, the relationship between video games and your family, and with it, something quite dramatic happened to your father whilst you’re playing a video game and you weren’t even aware of it.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Yes. I became aware of it maybe an hour later, but basically, during the invasion, because my parents were members of the resistance, we had to move from house to house because their names was on the list for execution. Our family members had gone to wherever for the summer and were stuck – like many Kuwaitis – were stuck outside of Kuwait for the entire period. We were just moving from house to house and the house that we were in on that block was a kid with Castlevania and I will find any excuse to go to his house.

Lauren Martin

What is Castlevania, for those who don’t know?

Fatima Al Qadiri

At the time, it was a game on the... originally called, Vampire Killer. It was a game on the MSX machine, which was just a little keyboard with a slot for a cartridge, but it was a computer keyboard. There was no joystick or anything and I barely knew this kid. I just wanted to play the game. [laughs] He was cool but I was just like, “Let’s do this.” That day, my mom and my sisters, I think had gone to visit someone and I was unsupervised and went over and was playing Castlevania. In the hour that I had gone, my father was taken from the house by Iraqi soldiers to a prison camp in Iraq, in Basra. And I was spared witnessing that scene and when I came back to the house, there was no one there and when my mom came back, she said that, “Your father has gone to Switzerland.” [laughs] Which I found hard to believe. I knew something was up. So yeah, _Castlevania _has this special memory, let’s put it this way.

Lauren Martin

But it’s interesting, as horrible as an experience, what is interesting from a point of view of how this has influenced you going forward is that the soundtracks to these games are tied up with a trauma, and trauma as a prolonged experience over a period of time and certain sounds and certain images, they trigger this. What’s next, a drawn out kind of experience where the music that you made from it was you trying to help someone else visualize something that they can’t see and that in turn, you didn’t even see in the first place. It’s interesting to see how the use of video games in your work and the experience of the invasion can overall tie together. I think it would be quite good to play an example of this from the EP that was inspired by all this. Do you have a preference for which track?

Fatima Al Qadiri

I think you could play “Ghost Raid” because it’s about aerial bombing.

Lauren Martin

Okay. You don’t need to watch this. It’s just my iTunes. It’s nothing too grand. What is the name of this EP and what was the name of it directly influenced by?

Fatima Al Qadiri

Desert Strike was named after Mega Drive/Sega Genesis in the States, a game I think by Electronic Arts, if I’m not mistaken. But it was made exactly a year after the liberation of Kuwait and I remember buying it. It was based on Operation Desert Storm, the title, which was a military operation that the Allies took part to repel Iraqi forces. I remember buying it and putting it in and the first scene from the game, there’s this long scenario that plays out before you start playing the game of a man being lowered into a cauldron. And there is a war museum in Kuwait that has graphic, graphic scenes of torture of Kuwaitis by Iraqi soldiers that children are taken to. And I remember immediately after the liberation when school started again we were taken to the war museum and I was like, “Are you fucking kidding me? You’re like showing graphic scenes of torture to 10-year-olds. This is nuts!” But seeing that in the video game, I was like, “Wait, what is going on?” They didn’t use the name Saddam. It was just this alternate universe that looked the same. Then the game started and there was no music. It was just the sound of the chopper, which is this really horrible frequency and the sound of bombs dropping. It was just an aerial view going around the desert and it made me realize that this game was not made for the entertainment of children. Children are not entertained by this shit. There’s no music. There is nothing even remotely childlike about this game. I really believe that it’s the first military training video game. Just ulterior motive for this game was to train the military and not for the entertainment of children adolescence, anything.

Lauren Martin

This is a music inspired that game.

Fatima Al Qadiri – “Ghost Raid”

(music: Fatima Al Qadiri – “Ghost Raid”)

Lauren Martin

Can you give a big hand for that track? It’s one of her own productions.

[applause]

Now, what is really interesting about that EP is that although it’s a body of work inspired by the soundtracks of video games, and not just the soundtracks produced for them but also the sounds within the games, that is an EP loaded with samples. Can you speak a little bit about how you actually made those kinds of records and how you went about recreating those kinds of feelings in the tracks?

Fatima Al Qadiri

I think that one is not so much inspired by video games soundtracks. It’s inspired by the lack thereof, and Desert Strike didn’t have a soundtrack. I made one for it. It just had this sickening frequency of a chopper. I think it has to do with it when me and my sister towards the end of the invasion, towards the time of the aerial bombing, came across a keyboard in the house and started making music together. And that first piece that we made together, neither of us remember exactly, but I remember the one that I made after. But I started making music and memorizing little melodies on a keyboard and recording them on tape until the age of 19. From nine to 19, the keyboard just got bigger and the tapes got longer. Around 19 is when I was in the University of Miami doing a composition course and had access to a studio for the first time, which was very exciting. But the only samples in Desert Strike really are the sounds of gunshots and explosions. Everything else is written.

Lauren Martin

Okay, in that respect, we’ve spoken a lot about the Gulf so far and how you relate the familiar and the unfamiliar. Maybe we’ll take this personal geography to a different place and play something off your album. I think I’d quite like to play the opening track, if you don’t mind.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Yeah, it’s up to you.

Lauren Martin

It’s up to me? Okay.

Fatima Al Qadiri feat. Helen Feng – “Shanzhai”

(music: Fatima Al Qadiri feat. Helen Feng – “Shanzhai” / applause)

Lauren Martin

Now, what was brilliant about playing that to a room full of people, and some of the people aren’t familiar with that album, when everyone started to switch and they realized what it was and what it was not. Could you give us a little bit of a story about how that track came to be and how it actually was the star of the album?

Fatima Al Qadiri

Yeah, I’ve recounted this many times, but basically, there’s this art collective in New York called Shanzhai Biennial and they were making a work at PS1 that involved finding a fake version – by fake, I mean that the lyrics were completely wrong – of “Nothing Compares to You” on YouTube and then they got this professional singer. I think she’s in a punk band to sing it and they sent me the acapella and they said, “Can you please make us a cheap Chinese version of this?” Which is their exact words and I was like, okay. I sent them this and they’re like, “No, this is too sophisticated. We can’t use it.” I was like, “Oh, shit!”

Lauren Martin

That’s interesting in itself because it’s too sophisticated to be what, a Chinese?

Fatima Al Qadiri

A cheap Chinese version of... They were shooting this video that was really, really high-def, beautiful video and they wanted the music to sound like shit. They wanted the music to sound like it came from a corner shop. I knew that’s not what I did. It doesn’t sound like... To me, this sounds like Chinese Gotham City and they were like, “Sorry, we can’t use it.” I literally was on the phone, “No!” And then I was like, “Fuck this, I want to use this track.” That’s how it started.

Lauren Martin

When you see a Chinese Gotham City, this is a different perspective of China or an imagined China? Could you explain what you mean by an imagined China when you’re creating tracks like these? Because the album is essentially devoted to the idea.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Just imagine China, very briefly, is just a China that doesn’t exist. It exists in a collective imagination over decades if not centuries. It’s a series of stereotypes that are bricks that have been put to create a pyramid of stereotypes and a pyramid of illusions created by decades and centuries of Western collective imagination.

Lauren Martin

When you’re building that pyramid of an imagined China, what are the blocks within that pyramid? What were you thinking of when you were making this record?

Fatima Al Qadiri

Blocks are just experiences that you’ve had with pseudo-Chinese music, pseudo- Chinese imageries, pseudo-Chinese rituals, whatever it is. I quote Lady and the Tramp, “We are Siamese (If you Please),” in the record, because it was an early exposure to this pseudo-Chinese, an imagined Chinese narrative.

Lauren Martin

In terms of production, that might sound a little bit theoretical and a bit heavy, but in terms of the production, it was actually fairly effortless for you to find these samples because they’re already part of this offer that you used, right?

Fatima Al Qadiri

Yeah, I mean, this is the thing. In Logic, I didn’t notice until I started making this record that there’s an Asian kit. It’s there. It’s Asian. Like, “Where? Asia is huge motherfucker.” [laughs]

Lauren Martin

Yeah, the idea of Asian, meaning Chinese.

Fatima Al Qadiri

This is another thing that the record highlights is this idea of the word, Asian. Every time somebody... We all love to think that we’re individuals and people from around the world love to think that we’re individuals and if you were to refer to a person from whatever country as an entire continent it maybe makes sense to you to group everybody together. There’s that website, Africa is Not a Country.

Lauren Martin

That’s exactly what I meant.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Asia is not a country. It may be is the most diverse continent in the world. To call someone Asian or something Asian, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s just grouping the most diverse languages and cultures and whatever into just one monolithic hall.

Lauren Martin

The tracks in the album and the idea behind it is a way to try and confront something like that from your own perspective?

Fatima Al Qadiri

The record explores the idea of monolithic ideas, generalizations, false narratives, false historical narratives, colonialism. The legacy of colonials, it partly has created this false China.

Lauren Martin

Also, from a personal perspective, obviously, the opening track is quite different to the rest of it, but do you think we should play something off the album that’s not the opening track, just so people get a sense what the rest of this is like?

Fatima Al Qadiri

Yeah, sure, whatever.

Lauren Martin

I almost didn’t start that sentence.

(music: Fatima Al Qadiri – “Szechuan” / applause)

Lauren Martin

In terms of your personal geography, you’re trying to make – or you have made, not trying to – you made an album, an imagined China from a perspective of a Kuwaiti woman who’s lived in the States but you’re using it with a kind of loose template of a genre that’s very much of a very particular city, which is London. What is your relationship with grime music and how did this tie together in the album?

Fatima Al Qadiri

I guess, the thing is with grime, I was exposed to it in, I want to say 2003. And as soon as I heard it, as soon as I heard Wiley specifically and his production, I was like, “Okay, game over. Game over for everybody.” It just sounded like the most timeless music. It sounded like someone had taken video game music and advanced it into the realm of, let’s say, classical composition, whereby you couldn’t guess what was going to happen in the next four bars. It was repetitive, but you still didn’t know how everything came together. It was just such a puzzle. Even if repeated, I was like, “I still have no idea of what’s going on.” The most futuristic music is the music that is timeless. If you listen to it 20 years, you’re all, “I don’t understand.” I instantly had an affinity to grime because also, it was so very digital, which appealed to me and it was very raw and very menacing. It had this menacing... It had a taunting, which is also part of the sparring of MCs. It’s taunting each other, cutting into each other but there was a playground vibe to it. Even if they get really violent with their threats, it’s still like, “Nah, you don’t mean this.” I know some people who have been killed over it and so it’s not really a joke. [laughs] Several and many and countless MCs have gone to jail, blah, blah.

But from a production aspect to me, there was this reference to video game music because early on, it was made on Playstations as some of you know. Predator said something really beautiful in an interview. I don’t know where exactly but he said, “Grime is freedom.” That’s how he characterized grime. That meant everything to me. You can just do whatever you wanted. So much of my music, the beats are made haphazardly. I’ll be the first to admit it. I’ll never classify myself as a beatmaker. I use melodies, that’s my forte. I was instantly drawn to the melodies of grime and the sounds of it. The way that I work in production is interpretation of existing ideas. It was interpreting grime and sinogrime is not a real genre. It’s more like a fossil that was dusted off and I was like, “Oh, yeah. These dudes all made like sinogrime.” Kode9 was the person who identified, who is like the scientist in the lab and found his molecules that were doing the same thing but nobody gave it a name.

Lauren Martin

Just for the sake of context, for people who aren’t aware of that, what do you mean by that term?

Fatima Al Qadiri

I mean it’s basically, sinogrime is grime that made use of, quote/unquote, “Asian” motifs, and there’s a few producers that were making that, Jammer is a big example, but not being aware. It wasn’t a scene. There was no sinogrime night or whatever. It was just something that happened and that’s what I was trying to also explore with Asiatisch. Producers from the States, from the UK, from wherever else were drawn to Asian motifs in music as a way of using it in a competitive way with each other as a taunt, as, “I am stronger than thou.” [laughs] It was used as a kind of holy weapon, as a kung-fu master type of thing.

Lauren Martin

Yeah, it’s angry but it’s also really elegant.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Exactly. I mean, it’s a kind of a martial art. Using the language of martial art in music. Elegant moves, et cetera. It’s not brute force. It has more of a philosophy or more of an eruditeness or whatever. It has more of a strategy behind it.

Lauren Martin

That’s not the only example of you being influenced by grime. We’ve spoken mostly about your own solo work but you do collaborate with other people, and I think it’d be good to play a collaborative track that’s inspired by grime and the works of vocalists, and it’s a group one.

Fatima Al Qadiri

The Future Brown one.

Lauren Martin

Also, congrats in getting signed to Warp Records. That is absolutely amazing.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Thanks.

[applause]

Lauren Martin

For the history of Future Brown, could you explain who Future Brown are, as well as yourself and how you met?

Fatima Al Qadiri

Future Brown is Asma Maroof, Daniel Pineda who are both producers as Nguzunguzu, and myself and Jamie Imanian-Friedman who goes by the name J-Cush and runs the label, Lit City Trax. We all kind of met in 2010 in New York and decided to collaborate as Future Brown in 2012.

Lauren Martin

This is quite a recent one for you. Yeah, this is a Future Brown record.

Future Brown feat. Tink & 3D Na'Tee – “Wanna Party (Remix)”

(music: Future Brown feat. Tink & 3D Na'Tee – “Wanna Party (remix)”)

Lauren Martin

I hope that woke you up.

[applause]

Now, this is yet another segue into another style of music that you work with, which is R&B, because that was a singer, Tink, on that track, wasn’t it?

Fatima Al Qadiri

I think that’s more of a rap track than R&B but she’s a singer and a rapper. This was made for her as a club track. She asked for a club track.

Lauren Martin

Your work with Future Brown, it’s very explicitly music that you make for live artists, live recording artists. What was the thinking in starting Future Brown and how you felt that you could work it together with a group of people? Because I remember a really interesting thing that you said, that as a solo artist, you find it quite hard to physically realize your own ideas and that’s why working in a group was really interesting for you. What did you mean by that?

Fatima Al Qadiri

I guess, there’s a lot of things that you can do by yourself but with collaborations, it’s the more the merrier. I don’t know. Me and Jaime randomly saw this documentary right before Future Brown was formed about the making of Michael Jackson’s Bad album and how many producers worked on that album, including Quincy Jones and Michael as executive producers and we’re like, “Wait, we need to work with a bunch of people to like make really serious records.” I feel like it’s fine for me to make instrumental music or occasionally sample vocals, whatever, but like I said, because I don’t really consider myself as a beat maker, the four of us working together, we can achieve much more, especially, making music for vocalists. It’s hard for individuals to do it. We just feel as a team, we have more power musically.

Lauren Martin

Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but I read that you don’t like to perform live at all. You just like to DJ.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Yeah, I don’t perform live. Just the idea of performing virtual instruments, I think you have to, first of all, be a really serious gear programmer person to perform stuff that’s completely programmed in a computer. For me, I feel like I don’t see it as being a very entertaining thing to watch. If there’s not a live singer or something, I’m not going to get into it.

Lauren Martin

So that’s almost the purpose of Future Brown, in a way?

Fatima Al Qadiri

Yes and no. I feel like performance is a separate field. Production is one field, performance is another field that you have to invest time in, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and I would rather be making music than performing. It’s that simple.

Lauren Martin

We’ve managed to travel quite a wide area. We’ve been to the Gulf. We’ve been to the States. We’ve been to London. It would be quite nice to go back to the Gulf and talk about some more collective work that you do. Could you explain what GCC is?

Fatima Al Qadiri

GCC is... The name of the collective is based on the Gulf Cooperation Council, which is a six-nation, let’s say socio-economic pact much like the EU. It’s like calling yourself, EU or NAFTA or whatever. And we’re eight artists from the Gulf and we create work dealing with hidden rituals of the region.

Lauren Martin

What do you mean by “hidden rituals”?

Fatima Al Qadiri

By hidden, like how much do you know about the Gulf? Let’s face it, you don’t know anything. [laughs]

Lauren Martin

Hey, it’s not fair. I know you.

Fatima Al Qadiri

You know very little. Whatever the media is feeding you... Also, there’s so much being undocumented in the region. It’s just an area that’s full potential to crystallize and explore, et cetera. Yeah, there’s so much. There’s the thing, most people what they know about the Gulf is Dubai and Dubai is not the Gulf. Dubai is its own kind of Babylon. It has very little to do with the real and the rest of the Gulf. It’s just wanting to delve into our native region and explore things that are happening that nobody is exploring, really.

Lauren Martin

What do you think is happening that you can explore in GCC because there’s this phrase that you’ve used in other interviews called, “Gulf futurism”?

Fatima Al Qadiri

Gulf futurism doesn’t really have a lot to do with GCC, I have to say. I mean, Gulf futurism is a term coined by Sophia Al Maria that has to do with the mutation of the region, the physical mutation of the region. GCC is exploring the present and has little to do with the past.

Lauren Martin

Speaking of her, I thought we could play one of your videos that she’s directed. Are we good for that? Who is the woman that directed this video?

Fatima Al Qadiri

Sophia Al Maria is an artist and filmmaker from Qatar. Her father is Qatari, her mother is American. I met her, I think also in 2010 or 2009 maybe when we worked together on a proto GCC work.

Fatima Al Qadiri – “How Can I Resist U”

(music: Fatima Al Qadiri – “How Can I Resist U” / applause)

Lauren Martin

Now, that might not be a typical framing of Arab women in a music video. In fact, if they’re even any in music videos at all. I’m curious as to how that sort of video and that sort of sounds relates to your ongoing relationship with the Gulf because it’s also very interesting that in the video, they have a Bluetooth code. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I think Bluetooth was banned in Saudi Arabian malls because of how young people shared images of each other.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Yeah, I mean Bluetooth in malls in the Gulf is like instant hook up. It’s like Grindr for straight people. If you turn on your Bluetooth, you’re going to find stoned Kuwaiti, “Kiss me now,” whatever it is and it’s just a very silent way of communicating with someone and a very clandestine way of communicating with people in a room and getting their information and their digits and whatever so you can later hook up without anybody knowing around you.

Lauren Martin

Is that quite a Gulf Arab experience for young people, living through screens like you live through video games and cartoons and now, young people are living through the Internet and their phones?

Fatima Al Qadiri

No, but even when I was a teenager, you couldn’t date people. You could only marry them. All the dating stuff had to happen very, very under the carpet. It was just very, very difficult. It was all on the phone. You talk to a boy for six months before meeting him and you’re like, “Ew.” [laughs] Or whatever. It was just a voice on the phone. It was all about illusion. Creating illusions about relationships. It still exists today, except now, people have multiple phones for multiple personas. It’s all about creating a persona as far as Arab dating is concerned. I think it’s like catfish but on a national scale. [laughs] Actually, Sophia is the one that taught me about this, let’s call it a genre of dancing. It’s called M’alayah. I had no idea this existed in the Gulf. She revealed something to me, which is what I mean by “hidden.” I’m from the region and I didn’t even know this existed. This is how secretive everything is. Also, if you’re not a man, you know less because you have this dance only in public and private events. I had no idea, and this is mostly popular in the Emirates. The women are always fully clothed but the dancing is hyper sexual and there’s children at these events. If you watch videos of this stuff, it’s the most bizarre thing. You would never think that this stuff was happening over there.

Lauren Martin

With the idea of things being almost in plain sight but also hidden, how would you try and work through that in your music with the idea of these traditions and new technologies at the Gulf?

Fatima Al Qadiri

I mean, traditions, the only thing that maybe comes into my own personal music from traditions is I think how the beats are so disjointed. Because if you listen to, for instance, that first song that we played, the music of the pearl divers, beats are, I want to say, weird. They’re made using clay pots, and glasses and rhythmic hand clapping and if you listen to Kuwaiti folk music in general, it’s a combination of several things. It uses Indian instruments, Indian drums. It uses Tanzanian rhythms, Tanzanian beats. I only found this out because I accidentally stumbled upon Tanzanian folk music and I was like, “Whoa, this is crazy.” It sounds exactly like Kuwaiti music. And Saudi Arabian or Arabic lyrics, there is Iranian influence. Just a 360, everything that’s around Kuwait inspires its folk music. It’s just this weird combination of a lot of different things, but visually, obviously, GCC is exploring the present, the here and now of Gulf rituals.

Lauren Martin

Seeing as we’re managed to a whole loop from the past to present, I think we could probably wrap that up. Could you give a massive round of applause for Fatima Al Qadiri.

[applause]

Does anybody have any questions that you’d like to ask?

Audience Member

Hey, this question has to do with something we’ve been discussing with other girls from the Academy. How do you manage developing your music in a space that has a lot of stereotype-elements like Arabic music, being a woman, that Asian sound you were talking about? I feel that too because I’m Chilean. I’m from Latin America. Latin American sound has other ways of being stereotyped. Is that a conscious work for you when you make music like in moving what your music means? Because you come from linguistics and because for me, your music doesn’t sound stereotyped, it’s very free with such different elements and maybe an advice on that.

Fatima Al Qadiri

You have a lot of questions in that question. [laughs] The thing with being a woman, you just have to ignore. You just have to ignore it. You just have to act like you’re not different, and that’s my best advice to you and not let it be a problem. And when it does become a problem, you try to ignore it harder. That battle is not going to end any time soon. You just have to face it by not letting it get to you. With the other question, Latin America, South America, it’s just when you’re grouped in these ways, the only thing you can do is try to educate people around you in the politest way that you can because some people just haven’t had a friend like you to talk them through their stereotypes that they’ve been fed by their society, by their elders, by whatever, by their peers. Wherever you go, just be kind and patient and explain and if they’re nice people, you’ll change their mind. Does that answer your question?

Audience Member

Yeah, but it was also about... because you really use your Arabic tradition in a musical way and it’s not like a stereotyped way of working on that. It’s just not Arabic music.

Fatima Al Qadiri

The thing with every culture is that it has one element of that is not explored by its own native population. I’m sure in Chile, there’s some aspect of your musical culture that no one has thought to play with and creating stuff is playing. I know in Japanese music, Japanese folk music, there is so many things that the Japanese haven’t messed with yet. I’m going to mess with them. [laughs] The thing is with the religious anthems, they have been used, they have been sampled in the past by Westerners, but the same thing with Chilean music or whatever that you’re interested in and it doesn’t even... When you’re using something that’s not from your culture, you have to be able to explain why because then you’re accused of appropriation, which is somebody just using something blindly for whatever reason, without being mindful of where that thing comes from. I would just say, dig in your own backyard.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Audience Member

I was hoping you could just elaborate on the video and what finding that style of dancing meant to you and then what broadcasting it meant to you and all the little messages that are flashing because I want to hear more about it.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Sophia made that entire video, and she showed it to me after it was done. Imagine if you think you know something but you don’t. If you think you know everything about your culture but you don’t, but that’s the reality of being in the Gulf. It’s coming from a very, very secretive culture. When I say secretive, I mean there is so much that’s not in the public realm and the Internet has facilitated for those things to come to the public realm, but you have to know about them to search for them. You can’t search for the stuff not knowing what it’s called, not knowing it exists. That’s how she was able to find it because she had heard about these private events. They’re all private. They’re not open to the public where this kind of dancing happens, et cetera, and because she’s from Qatar and lived for some time in the Emirates. I mean the message is the name of the song is “How Can I Resist U” and it’s about this coming from a very conservative culture where you’re not allowed to do anything in public. You can’t kiss someone in public, blah, blah, blah. You have to really resist temptation at all times, et cetera, and behind closed doors, anything goes. But that’s the reality of the region is that there is this extreme disconnect between public and private.

Lauren Martin

There’s a person at the back. Could we give him a mic?

Audience Member

I’m from Italy and I have a question, which is not about Italian music you played before for us, but listening to your music and listening to you speaking today, it sounds a lot like most of your work is about what’s false and what’s true, what’s a stereotype and identity and what identity means, if this word has a meaning or not. I was wondering, since you just told us that you’ve been growing up with some of your imagery formed by this Japanese cartoon, how does it feel like to be in Japan now and to perform in Japan soon? I know that you performed before even though you don’t like the word “performing,” but I mean proposing your work in here and how the stereotypes who have been growing in your mind that do reflect in your actual life spending some time here.

Fatima Al Qadiri

This is maybe my sixth time in Japan. The first time I was here was in 1993, which was a long time ago. But my sister lived here for 10 years, so I visited her many times but this is the first time that my music will be amplified [laughs] while I am present in the room. Just got to be honest. I think the idea of interpretation – interpretation is taking something and making it into something else, how people interpret passages from the Bible or whatever. Things are not black and white. Even if something is written, you can always divert the meaning of a sentence. And I think this is how I approach music is that no matter how you think something should be and this is why I made the record Genre Specific Xperience is that, because something is a BPM and has this synth in it and has this kind clap or kick drum doesn’t mean that it’s this genre. Nobody decided that, “This is this or this is that,” or whatever. I just feel like the way the categories exist to contain music, to contain people, to contain ideas, these are all false. These are made to control people and they are the reverse of freedom.

Lauren Martin

Is there anybody else or are we all good for questions? We have another one.

Audience Member

Hi, I’m Chelsea. I kind of wanted to ask about in terms of art making, I feel like digital art has this kind of innate streak of maybe snarkiness, but it’s enjoyable, humor-full way to express ideas, which is in any other medium would be really laborious to achieve. I just wanted to know, is it something that you’re conscious of or want to achieve, a sense of humor?

Fatima Al Qadiri

I think I want to be direct and say that I think that comedy is the highest art form and humor is higher than music, higher than visual art, whatever to make people confront their most despairing, disgusting aspects of humanity is the greatest art. I think this is why humor is very useful in visual art but still the words are lacking. The word irony, the word snarkiness, the word...

Audience Member

I was really trying to find a better word but I just...

Fatima Al Qadiri

No, I think irony, satire, these words are, they’re open and shut cases. They don’t contain the breadth of expression that humor is trying to achieve in visual art, which is also really open to interpretation. I just feel that all these things like trying to ascribe a kind of notion to an entire medium of art making just it doesn’t reflect reality. That’s when words need more words. We need to coin more words to express what we’re trying to say.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Thanks.

Lauren Martin

No more questions? Great, okay. Can we have another massive round of applause for Fatima Al Qadiri today?

[applause]

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