Genre-Specific Xperience is a project by Kuwait musician Fatima Al Qadiri that serves as her second extended play in her discography. Its intention is to reinterpret five musical genres through audio and visuals: juke, hip hop, dubstep, electronic tropicalia, and what the press release labeled as "‘90s Gregorian trance." The main idea of the project regards what would happen if the "limitations" of a genre were bypassed or altered. The visuals for the tracks were produced by Tabor Robak, Sophia Al-Maria, Ryan Trecartin, Rhett LaRue, Kamau Patton, and production company Thunder Horse. The music videos premiered at New Museum on 21 October 2011, and the extended play itself was released by UNO Records on 25 October to favorable reviews from professional music journalists. A remix record titled GSX Remixes was released in May 2012 and features re-edits of tracks from Genre-Specific Xperience by acts such as Ikonika and DJ Rashad.
Concept and composition
The overall project of Genre-Specific Xperience intends to sonically and visually reinterpret five genres: juke house ("Corpcore"), hip hop ("Hip Hop Spa"), dubstep ("How Can I Resist U"), electronic tropicalia (“D-Medley”), and what the press release labeled as "‘90s Gregorian trance" (“Vatican Vibes”). Critic Shawn Reynaldo also noticed elements of 1990s new age music on the record. The tracks were produced with a MIDI controller and virtual instruments. In categorizing the overall style of the music, Carrie Battan of Pitchfork explained that it "harnesses the eerie mysticism of WARN-U [...] but channels it into a percussive, neo-global club sound driven by an unexpectedly sinister synthetic steel drum."
Qadiri viewed a genre as a set of certain "limitations" that make up music of a specific sound or style. Thus, she made the songs and visuals that commentated on what would happen if those limits were bypassed or changed. Kathleen Flood of The Creators Project stated that the music and visuals of Genre-Specific Xperience present the internet "as a multi-dimensional venue, underscoring the significance of working with found footage and how the act of collaborating and translating a theme or emotion through multiple mediums can resonate much deeper than streaming a SoundCloud track."
Tracks and music videos
Genre-Specific Xperience opens with "Hip Hop Spa," the easiest track for Qadiri to create due to hip hop's “broad visual language.” "Hip Hop Spa" includes chanting, steel drums, and drum machines. As Benns summarized Kamau Patton's video for the song, it "depicts typical hip-hop video elements—money, women, drugs—and films them in a disaffected, distorted and rough manner." Both Patton and Qadiri also took into consideration the similarities between being in "solitary confinement in a spa" and being isolated from other humans in prison when making the track and visuals. "D-Medley" continues the structure of "Hip Hop Spa," maintaining the chants, steel drum sounds, and electronic drums and adding trance-style synthesizers to it. "D-Medley"'s video was produced by Thunder Horse and, as Flood wrote, "explores the fantasy realm through culled YouTube footage of bodacious babes."
"How Can I Resist U" and "Corpcore" are Genre-Specific Xperience''''s more dancefloor-suitable tracks. "How Can I Resist U" consists of what Reynaldo described as "stuttering snares, tweaked vocal samples, and thick, lurching bass tones." The track's video was directed by Sophia Al-Maria and was described by Qadiri as a "love letter to London, dubstep and being a Gulf Arab" The video is a collection of footage downloaded from YouTube of females dancing at mens-only parties in the Middle East. As Qadiri explained, "The video is about temptation and the relationship between the Gulf and London, how London represents a kind of forbidden fruits playground for Gulf Arabs for several decades now."