Since the beginning of the year Boeing has been running an ad called "You Just Wait" to celebrate the aircraft company’s centennial. In it, Boeing forecasts an extremely optimistic vision of 2116—a future where Boeing’s cutting-edge research helps create a spotless and conflict-free world replete with colonies on Mars, regular travel to the Moon, unlimited clean energy, and smiling innocent children. It's a startlingly ironic piece of corporate lip-service that sidesteps the company’s long history of defense contracts and early pioneering in the military industrial complex. I first saw the ad in the gym, being broadcast across an array of large flat-screen televisions—a dramatic commercial break that followed ominous speculations on the incoming results of the South Carolina primary.
The album I was listening to at the time was Fatima Al Qadiri’s Brute, a piece of music ideally suited to a time of shadowy corporate manipulation and apocalyptic political theater. Qadiri started writing Brute last year while recovering from a knee injury in Kuwait, unable to move much for more than a month. The injury coincided with the height of the horrific news cycle that included the events of Ferguson, Baltimore, and more. Reminded of the first large-scale protest she attended as a freshman in college and shaken by the sheer scale of the police force that met the protesters, she conceived of Brute as a celebration of the right of protest, which is funny when you’ve listened to its 11 songs and realize there isn't all that much celebrating going on. If anything, the album runs as direct counterpoint to the optimistic future that Boeing presents in its ad.
This is made immediately clear by the album’s disconcerting cover: a dead-eyed and inhuman Teletubbie in SWAT gear. The art was designed by the artist Josh Kline, borrowing from his piece Freedom, which the New Yorker described as an "elegy to lost hope and broken promises." This is an equally apt description of Qadiri's dystopian music: Starting with "Endzone," Fatima creates an ominous découpé from live recordings of the unrest in Ferguson. The sounds of gun shots, walkie-talkie beeps, explosions, crowds screaming, overwhelming confusion, and the weaponization of sound via the police’s use of LRADs (Long Range Acoustic Device) is mixed together with a slow burning thump—resulting in a heart-palpitating minute of music. In fact, the album’s three best moments come from the songs that feature extended sample use. In "Blows" Al Qadiri opens and closes the track with a now-infamous report by MSNBC news anchor Lawrence O'Donnell chastising the excessive police brutality at Occupy Wall Street. And in the album’s closer "Power," arguably the album’s only danceable moment, she deftly inserts a cutting interview with ex-LAPD sergeant Cheryl Dorsey on the abuse of police power in the middle of a dizzyingly spacious and confident sonic environment.
These moments bring Qadiri's music somewhere outside the usual purview of electronic music: Brute is in some ways closer to a piece of Brechtian theater than a traditional album. But outside of the successful manipulation of samples and found sounds, there are large blocks of shapeless tracks that excessively borrow from her previous projects. The descending chord progression and sweep of vocals in "Blood Moon" feels like it was copy-and-pasted from "Hydra," a track from her Desert Strike EP. "Breach," with its swooping helicopter sample and belching bass, is similarly a pastiche, mixing elements of Desert Strike and her last two albums: Asiatisch and Future Brown. There are far too many of these moments in Brute: "Fragmentation," a moody and string-heavy track in the album’s back half, might have been cut from Asiatisch and retrofitted for Brute.
Overall Brute is a frustrating mish-mosh of middling and artful. When it’s working, there is a certain panache in the high-powered, informationally dense musical speedballs she creates. Tracks like "Oubliette" (a reference to claustrophobic French dungeons) and "10-34" (the police code for riots) are perfect examples of the push-and-pull animating Qadiri’s most interesting work. When you listen to some of these songs you feel as if you’re being followed. As a conceptual piece, it’s unlike any politically driven electronic music being made today. It illustrates how exhausting and draining it is to be attuned to the problems of the world, but also how worthwhile it is keep yourself awake and see through the artifice.
