Medieval Femme

To Western ears, spoken Arabic can feel both sinister and — in a sort of classically Orientalist way — very perfumed, very baroque, very other. Al Qadiri always seems to be messing with this concept. In this molten vat of ten songs — all of which are, per her admission, supposed to be dark little trips into an imagined Arab garden — she’s folded in bits of poetry from seventh-century Arab poets, added some deafening low end, digital lutes, and organ pipes, and created another high-concept frontispiece that mixes grand psychological extremes alongside her permanent muse in the Middle East.