Taliesin Herb

On her debut album, Asiatisch, Senegal-born, US-based Kuwaiti producer Fatima Al Qadiri constructed a synthetic vision of modern China that both interrogated the consumerism that some feel lurks at the heart of the country’s economic surge and kept said interrogation at a superficial level, focusing on the artificiality of the new China’s towering skyscrapers and sprawling shopping malls without honing in on the humanity that has made all that possible, and therefore a mass of contradictions. Her follow-up, Brute, is concentrated on grittier realities, namely the new waves of protest that have gripped Western countries, and it emerges therefore as a more immediate and directly affecting work.