Fatima Al Qadiri mines familiar territory on her new Desert Strike EP, and I mean that not just as a terrible pun, but as a compliment to her conceptual process. Her work has often dealt with themes of dislocation and isolation growing up in Kuwait during the first Gulf War, and true to the fragmentary, often surreal experience of childhood trauma, she has processed her emotions through the medium most natural to her. As a child, the war manifested as a " really sad, minor key melody on the keyboard I played it to myself every day," she tells Gawker, and in many ways, her new EP Desert Strike can be seen as that earlier piece's grownup rejoinder—"a sort of abstract audio memoir." It plays off the sonic themes and takes its name from a Sega Megadrive video game called Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf that Qadiri and her sister played just a year after experiencing the real trauma of war—an ironic twist that speaks to the medium's desensitizing yet equally ameliorative power. Desert Strike is out today on Fade to Mind.
Stream: Fatima Al Qadiri's Desert Strike EP (via Gawker)
