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FATIMA AL QADIRIS TWISTED APPROPRIATIONS ARE NEITHER ONE THING NOR ANOTHER.
emix albums have got a bad rep. Just ask Fatima Al Qadiri, the Kuwait-raised/Brooklyn-based artist whose latest EP GSX Remixes should erase memories of Rihannas Rated R Remixed forevermore. Im interested in the remix album format cos its this hangover from the 90s, explains Fatima from her apartment in Brooklyns Dominican quarter. It was just a marketing scheme to sell a record twice, you know? Its a shitty formula that I wanted to try my hand at. GSX Remixes is the latest in a line of appropriative works from the globally-minded artist, whose musical experiments began with the little melodies she wrote on a Casio as a nine-year-old growing up in Kuwait. The remix disc takes a squiffy look at Fatimas already palimpsest-like Genre-Specic Xperience EP [UNO, 2011], which reinterpreted Gregorian trance, dubstep, hip-hop, electro-tropicalia and juke in ve tracks which are not quite of the genre they use as their starting point, but not not of them either. The standout is the anxious trance-chant Vatican Vibes, where Gregorian hymnals bleed into the creepy plinking of Logic steel drums with the jarring asymmetry of a dial-up modem. In the phenomenal accompanying video by New York-based artist Tabor Robak, Catholic consecration becomes the mission of a bioengineering HD video game (Holy Prepuce Acquired! reads one inter-title). Fatima came to prominence at the tail-end of 2011 when she released the WARN-U EP on Tri Angle Records under the name Ayshay. She twisted Islamic chants into sighing, ambient soundscapes that sound as forebodingly beautiful as their fucked up Arabic samples on the subject of massacres. The use of sacred hymns was decried as blasphemous by people who are religious or square, but Fatima now shrugs off their accusations as bullshit. I grew up with this music! she laughs. Nothing is sacred as far as audio is concerned anymore. Or, as ayshay translates in English: whatever. In the same vein, Fatima writes a regular column for DIS Magazine entitled Global.wav, to provide a platform for attention-worthy pop videos from around the world. Recent blogs have included Windows 97 screensaver vibes courtesy of Ukrainian pop and a Kurdish Turbo Folk rural rave. When asked to give recommendations for Clash readers though, Fatima clams up. No! she gasps. Im a hoarder! YouTube videos are the equivalent of white label vinyl these days, she laughs. Im too precious with that shit. Its a terrible habit! What she isnt precious about are the musical genres that she plunders for her own work. Hip Hop Spa eviscerates the titles luxe connotations for a rumbling, hair-tearing bassline, with its omnipresent

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steel pans oating like ominous icebergs. For GSX Remixes - the appropriation of an appropriation - Fatima invites her frequent collaborators Nguzunguzu to the spa, who lay the track with anxious drummachine handclaps and a soft lament that sounds a bit like, but not quite like, why why why?. Its as if an auto-tuned Ashanti had shown up to coo a irty critique of hip-hop imagery: neither part of its source genre nor outside of it, but somewhere in-between. Or as Jody Graf put it in an article for Cluster Mag entitled PostIrony And Fatima Al Qadiris Genre Specic Xperience, not totally sincere, but no longer interested in irony. Next up for Fatima is a release on Fade To Mind, the record label of Brooklyn-based producer Kingdom, which recently put out EPs from Nguzunguzu and MikeQ. Shes sketchy on the details, and is tinkering with the idea of a new moniker. But the idea of having a collection of pseudonyms is a little bit horrifying to me! she admits. I know Im going to be making a lot of records over the years. Whats certain though, is that her tweezed eyebrow will never be entirely un-cocked. gsx remixes is out now on uno records.

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