Photo by Dom Smith
There’s two ways of looking at Fatima Al Qadiri’s debut album: as a densely packed three-dimensional take on the sinogrime music that’s been a staple of East London’s sample banks since the early ’00s, or as the most fully formed example of the sociopolitical commentary that’s always simmered below the surface of the producer’s spring-loaded loops and multi-medium art projects. It’s enjoyable either way, a prime example of subversive beat-making writ large. With Asiatisch (Hyperdub, May 6th), that means a blurring of the line between East and West in the music itself—a collision between century-spanning Chinese melodies, holographic R&B hooks and the UK sound that references both—and the visual motifs that reveal themselves in due time.
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