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Fatima

by RUHAIL QAISAR

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  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      €8 EUR  or more

     

  • Book / Publication
    Book/Magazine + Digital Album

    48-page book with photographic documentation, lyrics & additional context.
    Urdu / English
    Limited to 100 copies worldwide
    Includes a download code for the album

    Mockup purely for reference, the final product may differ a bit!

    Design by Niels Wehrspann
    Nastaliq Typography by Aastha Gupta
    Translation work by Sheraz Ahmed, Abdur Rahman Jerral, Tazyne Fatima, and Asad Sheikh.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Fatima via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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Sachu Melung 04:21
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Namgang 03:48
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about

Ruhail Qaisar’s Fatima is a requiem for a dead future. The debut album release by the self-taught artist and producer screams with the trauma and decay of life in his hometown of Leh—a high-altitude plateau region in the contested Ladakh area, extending from the Himalayan to the Kunlun Ranges. Qaisar absorbs this external condition of perpetual conflict between nation states into his internal life and resulting compositions, crossing sound art, noise music and experimental filmmaking. Hauntological drones, power electronics and convulsive post-industrial dissonance create an unnerving sense of fear, anger, and alienation. A broken transistor with a knob tuned to the abyss is bombarded with the cries and bitter laughter of a city’s inhabitants tyrannized, not only by military occupation but the soft-power subjugation of the tourism industry.

Following 2016’s Ltalam EP—released under Qaisar’s now-defunct Sister moniker—Fatima serves to transmit memories carried through the events, local mythos and personal recollections of growing up between the remote agrarian villages of Ladakh and the urban center of its joint capital—Leh. The album was mixed between that area, and a DIY home studio in New Delhi, where the artist amalgamates his collected found sounds and field recordings into unrecognizable hybrids. Discordant pads and atmospherics on the dark ambient of “Daily Hunger” is disrupted by a crashing, pounding reverb, while contributor Elvin Brandhi shrieks towards its horrifying conclusion in the squelching, scratching sound of something soft being chewed.

An anti-lingual conjuring of metaphysical totems in music, Fatima is a seething chronicle of experience through the dynamics of riots, violence, colonization, unemployment, PTSD, and self-abuse. The cycling tumult of “Namgang” hosts a menacing whisper that echoes the hissing fury of something like Einstürzende Neubauten and Lydia Lunch’s “Thirsty Animal,” while a trouncing distorted bass line on “Fatima’s Poplar” circles a voice that barks, "The Western Civilization Show has been discontinued."

credits

released January 27, 2023

Recorded at:
The Bunker, New Delhi
Choglamsar Village, Ladakh

Mastering by Rashad Becker
Mixing by Julien Racine
Photography by Rana Ghose
Design by Niels Wehrspann

Lyrics for Fatima’s Poplar Taken from Circuitries by Nick Land
Spoken word on Painter Man by Dis Fig
Screams on Daily Hunger by Elvin Brandhi
Spoken Word on Fatima’s Poplar by Iben Lavinia Kasjer
Trumpet on The Fanged Poet by Rohit Gupta

Cover Urdu text by Aastha Gupta
Translation by Tazyne Fatima, Asad Sheikh, Abdur Rahman Jerral

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tags

about

RUHAIL QAISAR

Leh / Ladakh


Ruhail Qaisar is a self-taught artist from Ladakh, India. As a musician, he explores the confines of memory, the dry rot of intergenerational trauma, and the eerie swarms of the human unconscious, incorporating vernacular concepts, poetic gestures, and improvised chaos. ... more

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