Every week, a different FADER editor compiles a playlist to highlight a new release and give you a guide to that artist’s web of influences and peers. These Staff Selects live in our Spotify app, alongside GEN Fs from our archives and playlists for each issue. This week, it's Emilie Friedlander on digital hi-fi in underground music.
Writing my live review of the Brooklyn party Spa Night this week, I got to thinking about how in a civilization stitched together by social networks and mobile devices, reality can sometimes seem like it's taking cues from the virtual realm. Yesterday, almost as a case in point, a lot of people got excited when Kuwaiti artist Fatima Al Qadiri dropped "Ghost Raid," a track from her forthcoming EP, Desert Strike, which explores the irony of experiencing Operation Desert Storm partly through the lens of an FPS game that she used to play with her sister. In anticipation of the release, which comes out this month via Fade to Mind, I thought I'd put together some songs from a loose-knit contingent of underground artists who, like Al Qadiri, embrace the digital by tapping the world of Hollywood sample libraries, ringtones and video game music, confronting this blurring of life and its double.
Staff Selects: Music from a Virtual Planet
