Notions of place and displacement feature strongly in the works of Fatima Al Qadiri. Her clearly realized Desert Strike EP, which was based around the experience of playing a videogame based around Operation Desert Storm—an event she lived through as a child growing up in Kuwait—and Asiatisch arrives with a new cloud of conceptual thought hovering over it. Now based in Brooklyn, Al Qadiri uses her debut full-length as a lens to refract the skewed manner in which Asian motifs have sunk into Western pop culture. She calls it a “virtual road trip through ‘imagined China,’” a country she has never visited, but has extensively experienced through a barrage of appropriated thoughts, images, and sounds. It’s set to a musical backing so bare it feels like someone scooped out most of the contents and dumped them out, providing an intriguing counterpoint to the dense flood of thought the record carries on its back.
The ideas surrounding Desert Strike were inspired by the rapid bastardization of other cultural experiences by the West, dealing with a particular form of accelerated baton-handing that effectively transforms horror into fun in rapid time. Asiatisch—its title taken from the German word for Asian—broadcasts from a similar space, only with a stronger sense of remove at work. In a sense, it’s a forebear for how the West will dilute something like the first Gulf War 40 or 50 years from now, slowly contorting it and shaping it until it becomes something few who were actually there will have experienced. If Desert Strike was about feeling an immediate sense of personal remove, Asiatisch observes the long-term effects of societal remove, where great blocks of culture are siphoned off then progressively diluted until they have as much significance as an empty Coke can.
The tiny sub-genre of sinogrime—essentially the sound of London producers briefly looking East for inspiration circa 2002-3—has been vaunted as an influence on this record, although Al Qadiri admits she wasn’t familiar with the style until after this album was finished. Still, there are ties, although most sinogrime efforts were denser in structure than these songs. Sometimes there’s little more than a crisp trap snare and a bass welt or two; often there are glassy, MIDI-indebted synth lines padding away. “Jade Stars” sounds like a sci-fi Vangelis fantasy ripped straight out of Blade Runner, while “Wudang” features music so hollow it perfectly reflects the sunken feeling of binging on low culture for too long. Journalist Dan Hancox described sinogrime as a sub-genre “that barely ever existed”, which is fitting because Al Qadiri also makes music that barely exists, to the point where the gaps between notes almost become the songs themselves.
The best tracks further dilute culture in themselves, acting like real-time examples of the disintegration Al Qadiri is interested in. “Shanzhai” is titled after the word used to describe pirated goods produced by Chinese companies, which she turns into a cover of Sinead O’Connor’s version of “Nothing Compares 2 U” (itself a cover), using a vocal she describes as a “nonsense version” of the song sent to her by friends. It’s only a political record in a faint sense, making few overt statements outside of “Dragon Tattoo”, which observes Disney's racist co-opting of Asian culture by borrowing lines from “We Are Siamese” from Lady and the Tramp. Certainly it’s not always so easy to trace Al Qadiri’s intentions, and the largely dynamic-free range she operates in can grate at times. But the immaculate emptiness is, in a sense, Asiatisch’s masterstroke, helping bolster the pervading sense of dislocation of being exposed to a society that’s been fed through the photocopier one too many times.
