With the upcoming release of her debut EP WARN-U, Tri Angle is extremely excited to introduce Ayshay. Born in Senegal, raised in Kuwait and now living in New York City, Fatima Al Qadiri is the producer and vocalist behind Ayshay. Fuelled by her fascination with the sacred songs of Islam, WARN-U is a homage and reinterpretation of the sounds that have haunted Al Qadiri since she was a child. Constructed entirely out of her own vocals, which she filtered and layered upon one another, WARN-U is Al Qadiri's attempt to reconfigure the concept of "sacred" music as inspiring divine love and divine fear. Even in her adoption of the name Ayshay, a flippant term which means "whatever" in Arabic, Fatima Al Qadiri seeks to distance the austere values inherent in worship music from her own interpretation of the latter. Listening to the three songs Al Qadiri has created for this record, which work in sequence almost as a tone poem, conjures up a dizzying array of mixed, sometimes indefinable emotions. They sound menacing and yet strangely comforting, ancient and bizarrely futuristic. As well as Al Qadiri's own original material, the record features an epic 12-minute long megamix by L.A.-based production duo, Nguzunguzu. In keeping with the tone poem vibe of the original songs, the label agreed that the remix element of the record should mirror this, and so as opposed to commissioning a bunch of different remixers to put their spin on the material, they decided to have one act create one giant reinterpretation of all the songs featured on WARN-U, something which they referred to throughout the creative process as a remix suite, of sorts. When she's not producing music as Ayshay, Fatima Al Qadiri is responsible for the "Global.Wav" column on the brilliant online NYC culture magazine DIS, using her column to draw attention to the kind of obscure pop music that generally goes unnoticed in the Western world. Late last year, she gained some online attention with the "Muslim Trance" mix she made exclusively for DIS. The mix was made up of original Ayshay material which in contrast to the original a cappellas of WARN-U, reinterpreted Islamic anthems by sampling sacred Shi'ite and Sunni vocals with original music.
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