Listen to Fatima-Al-Qadiri’s Track “Xiaoya (Blossoming Flowers) feat. Li-Yuchun”:
Psst, I can let you in on a little secret…Fatima Al Qadiri‘s Brute LP, out now on Hyperdub, will be Live Eye Tv’s Best Album of 2016–but more on that later! Till then, we have this beautiful new track, “Xiaoya (Blossoming Flowers)”, and it finds the musician teaming up with the Chinese singer and fashion icon, Chris Lee/Li Yuchan. The song title references a poem from The Book of Odes, China’s oldest collection of verses, and it was created by Al Qadiri and Lee using “remote recording technology between Berlin and Beijing”. In addition, the track is part of an interactive online experience created by Lucy Hardcastle for i-D’s The Fifth Sense and it is inspired by CHANEL’s Nş5 L’eau. Hardcastle is currently studying her masters in Information Experience Design at the Royal College of Art and she has a background in textiles. For this project, the artist explores “scent as code” in an attempt to create an immersive audio/visual space inspired by our sensory experiences related to fragrance. Discussing the new work with i-D, she explains:
“Initially I went on lots of websites and saw what people had guessed the different notes in the fragrance to be, as it’s obviously a secret. I spent a lot of time smelling it — I went to Grasse, they had a lot of plants I had never seen before, like the tuberose. It’s so interesting, it’s a really expensive rose that is pretty much only used for perfume. We tried to implement the shape of the tuberose into the object that you see in the Molten room — it’s a different, mutated version of it. I like to make things that appear familiar but you don’t know why it’s familiar. I really wanted each space to be a different emotion, a different mood. Soft feels heavenly and light — to me it was a room that was meant to be about the personal relationship you may have with fragrance…”
Featuring four different “rooms”, Mist, Molten, Beam, and Soft, the viewer is provided with various tasks to complete, all narrated with different sounds from Fatima Al Qadiri’s soundtrack. Upon completion, the viewer enters a fifth room that unlocks the full track and accompanying music video. Visit i-D’s The Fifth Sense, here!
