Photography by Charlotte Krieger
In a live performance from 2015, musician Lafawndah is seen wearing a loose Jamiroquai t-shirt whilst sensuously jamming to a trip-hop beat, against an array of moving sequences extracted from the 1969 film The Colour of Pomegranates — a visual biography of 13th-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova.
It’s hard to verbally condense the sound and style of a musician whose every step has sought to eschew categorisation; but the aforepainted picture may help nudge us closer to her opaque yet viscerally discernible modus operandi.
Amidst a climate of artistic polyvalence which has seen the archetype of the multi-hyphenate become the ultimate pop signifier of the Anthropocene, the French-born Egyptian-Iranian musician exists, unbothered, self-reliant, and—crucially—unwilling to pull back the curtain on her creative underpinnings. “I’ve never lived in a world I could relate to all the way,” she has said. Her work has been described as experimental, “diaspora pop” with hints of Middle-Eastern folk, R&B and ambient electronica — equally proud of her scattered roots and cultural influences, Lafawndah (perhaps surprisingly) feels no craving for geographical or artistic belonging of any sort, contrary to her contemporaries rejecting singular categorisations only to surrender to the fuzzy meta-label of “polymath.” While others may sit everywhere, she doesn’t feel quite right sitting anywhere. “That’s just not my experience of being in the world.”
Her latest album, The Fifth Season, is inspired by the science fiction author N.K. Jemisin’s trilogy of the same name and extends as another homage to her literary and cinematic inspirations. Ahead of the release of her video for the track titled ‘Le Malentendu’ — directed by Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel and starring Love’s Aomi Muyock — we asked Lafawndah about making art in an age of disemobodied identity, chronological non-linearity and embracing apocalyptic sentiments with an open heart.
I’m interested in the cross-pollination at the centre of your music — it’s cultural, linguistic, sonic. Some people say there’s comfort in labels, but you seem to combat that perspective. Is that a fair assumption?
I guess there was never any genre or label that made me feel at home growing up and listening to things. So it would be weird to identify with any. The absence of a label doesn’t come from a place of “I’m so special”. It comes from the fact that I’ve never experienced comfort, I’m not familiar with that feeling. So living in between things makes much more sense to me, I know what that feels like.
There’s a cinematic quality to your music, but also a literary streak. Which creative disciplines or traditions are you most inspired by, excluding music — I’m mostly referring to literary movements, myths, visual arts…
All of it. They are all tools at my disposal to be the best storyteller I can be. The most precise and accurate.
Contrary to many contemporary musicians dabbling in experimental sounds, your sound and aesthetic are at once tinged with futurism and honouring tradition. How do you reconcile those two dimensions, and to what facets of traditional storytelling/folklore are you most drawn to?
I feel like separating the future and the past suggests that you understand time as a linear concept. I don’t. To me, the two inform each other continuously. I can’t predict the future but what I can do is imagine it—imagine how I’d like it to be rather than imagining it how I don’t.
I find that in order to imagine it, I need to visualise where I want this image to go. I need to draw from things that have already happened, but that have been hidden from us because they don’t fit the narrative of where the elite wants the world to go. I research people who have thought differently in the past and who have tried things differently.
Photography by David Uzochukwu
How have you navigated this year’s general sense of uncertainty, fear and, without wanting to sound dramatic, impending doom? I’m talking both about the personal/human and artistic levels.
I’m thinking about the openings that this situation offers. There’s a lot of openings at the moment. It’s a reshuffling of the cards in a way. There is both human tragedy and openings. I definitely feel like I’m on an insane roller coaster. But the way I’ve been navigating it is by reminding myself of the situation we’re in, not to take things too personally and to make decisions with a new set of priorities. More than ever, my priorities are communal and not individual. My favourite saying is that ‘sometimes we gotta be a rock, and sometimes we have to be water’. Right now, it’s time to ‘be water’.
There’s a general sense of melancholy in your music, a longing for a reality that is perhaps yet to manifest itself — or perhaps a form of transcendence. Does religion or spirituality inform either your personal philosophy or your creative process?
Yeah, it does but in ways that are not self-formulated. I am trying to open myself to invisible worlds, to open myself to have less control over things, although intentional but controlled less. I allow myself to get moved by things: becoming available as a vessel rather than a pilot.
Are you an optimist? Why or why not?
I don’t use that word. I’m an observer, a storyteller and an imagination user. And if the question is: is there a possibility of a more collective existence than this, my answer would be ‘yes’.
How would you describe the ambition of your music?
An opener. A glue. An invitation. A new normal. A motivation.
Photography by Ib Kamara
Watch the video for Lafawndah’s latest single ‘Le Malentendu’ featuring Lala &ce from the new album The Fifth Season.