Fatima Al Qadiri
„Brute“
(Hyperdub)

You hear a muffled voice saying, “drunk on power.” The drunkenness that has taken over our age, not as an event but as a condition that continues without interruption. The force we do not fully understand has come to dominate daily life in ways that feel both pervasive and strangely normalized. The muffled voice appears in “Power,” a track from “Brute” by Fatima Al Qadiri, released through Hyperdub in 2016.

I find myself returning to this record with a growing sense of precision. “Brute” not only anticipates the future but also articulates it as a condition that demands attention and action. Through both sound and image, it constructs a structure of feeling that has since become fully ambient yet persistently reminds the listener of what can be resisted. At the time of its release, the album was read alongside visible peaks of police violence. These peaks included, in particular, the 2014 Ferguson uprising following the police killing of Michael Brown and the 2015 Baltimore protests after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody. The politics of the album were understood in direct and referential relation to these incidents.
The cover image of “Brute” features a Teletubby dressed in riot gear, drawn from a sculptural work by Josh Kline in his series “Freedom.” Figures associated with childhood are scaled to adult proportions and outfitted with the equipment of state control. The result produces a tension that initially reads as exaggeration. The fusion of infantilized imagery with militarized authority registers as absurd, and even dystopian.

Within the album, the tracks unfold as spatial arrangements. They operate architecturally and construct corridors, barriers, zones of pressure. What emerges is not a sequence of events but the design of an atmosphere that allows the listener to perceive both oppression and potential opposition. Al Qadiri does not stage violence as spectacle; she renders it as condition. The sonic material is assembled from residues such as gunshots, sirens, synthetic brass, percussive bursts, fragments of voices that hover between human and machine sounds. Today, these markers no longer signal rupture; they measure duration. Alertness has shifted from a momentary state to a continuous baseline. Social media compresses confrontation into circulating fragments. Footage of protest appears between advertisements and casual entertainment. Violence does not interrupt the flow of images; it is absorbed into it. Exposure replaces shock and repetition replaces reaction. Yet within these patterns, “Brute” keeps the listener aware of where resistance can emerge and persist.

It is 2026. What once demanded interpretation now barely registers as interruption. The juxtaposition that once produced tension between innocence and militarized authority has dissolved into some kind of disturbing familiarity. The visual and sonic languages of force circulate without resistance. Repetition has stripped them of their strangeness. They persist as background.
The endurance of “Brute” lies in its restraint. By refusing narrative and a musical resolution, Fatima Al Qadiri avoids anchoring the work to a singular political moment. Instead, she composes an atmosphere that continues to map onto the present, one that urges us to listen, reflect, and act. Consequently, the album’s architecture insists beneath the surface: resistance continues to exist, grow, and intensify over time.

In a way, this also resonates with what Kodwo Eshun describes as sonic fiction, where music does not simply reflect its present moment but constructs a sense of time that exceeds it. Rather than documenting reality, sound operates as a medium that builds environments, anticipates conditions, and renders futures perceptible before they fully arrive. Within this frame, “Brute” does not feel predictive in a literal sense. It feels calibrated. Its textures, repetitions, and suspended tensions do not point toward an event but sustain a state that has since become ambient, normalized, and difficult to locate as rupture, and within that state, resistance continues to grow.

The refusal of resolution becomes central here. The tracks remain in suspension, never fully arriving, never collapsing. We exist in a continuous state of suspended almosts. The choral textures, almost human, almost synthetic, begin to resemble a collective voice. They insist, quietly but persistently, on the possibility of coming together, of holding a form of resistance even within these conditions. The album creates a private listening space, a concentrated experience that does not lose its force even within this increased dystopian atmosphere.
Listening to these songs alone, one feels the presence of “troublemakers,” and the enduring potential to resist grows stronger with every return.