Fatima

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... more
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