Iconoclast

Dear reader, if listening to They Are All Losing The War from Ikonika's debut LP Contact, Love, Want, Have is the only action that results from your reading this article, it has served a noble and higher purpose. If a robot had a heart and that heart had an attack, it would sound like They Are All Losing The War. “I still preach emotion on the dancefloor, but it's camouflaged, as my sets can seem vibrant and energetic,” explains Sarah Abdel-Hamid (aka Ikonika). A lazy deconstruction of Abdel-Hamid's music could simply reduce it to dubstep, but the influences on her two EPs and LP are varied and tangled.

“I grew up listening to a lot of UK garage, but also early dubstep like Skream, DMZ, stuff on Hyperdub. And a little bit of grime got me thinking about music production and DJing,” she explains. “Recently I've been into guys like Omar S, Levon Vincent and Legowelt. I'm really into stuff that has a similar vibe to classic Chicago house.” As with the now-defunct electroclash movement of which Legowelt was an integral part, Ikonika's sound is chimerical. Legowelt's house roots can be pulled from the background of a track like the I Make Lists EP's PR812, Omar S's more readily Catch Vibes. Ikonika's distillations are informed by “paranoia, romance and diegetic sounds” that alternate between the ambitious and frantic UK garage tempo, and instances of depopulated dubstep more reminiscent of Burial's orbital Loner. The otherworldly chill of Hyperdub kingpin Burial is epitomised in Contact, Love, Want, Have; an LP that furnishes an entire landscape of electronic production and application.

Yet the Ikonika sound is built from broader influences still. “I feel a special connection with video game soundtracks and their sfx. Bit music has a certain warmth, it's great nostalgia. I grew up playing games like Sonic and Streets Of Rage,” says Abdel-Hamid. Certainly, video game soundtracks (particularly those of '90s yore) are replete with complex rhythms and time signatures that get concealed by the obvious distraction of the game itself. Given Abdel-Hamid acknowledges video game soundtracks are a conscious influence on her sound, it was necessary to confront her with the hypothetical: if you could score a game, which videogame would that be? ”I think maybe Shadow Of The Colossus would sound great with loads of Moog arpeggios and strings, but I don't know. I wouldn't want to ruin any of the classic games,” she says.

The relatively reclusive Abdel-Hamid has vented her frustration with music journalism's gender bias to The Guardian, telling the British publication “I hate this 'first lady of dubstep' shit. Do they think I go around consciously thinking about my gender?” Googling any act with a couple of girls in it confirms the ridiculous gender preoccupation in music writing. The absurd impression conveyed by the general music writing body politic is that 'girl' is some inexplicable sub-genre of music: girl-pop, girl-group, and getting almost ludicrous, 'girl-step' (like, a bad play on dubstep); and that it's necessary to include gendered identifiers like 'songstress', 'muse', 'first lady' in mentions thereof. “I only want to be known as a DJ/producer/label owner without my vagina getting a shout out,” says Abdel-Hamid.

Ikonika will be playing the following shows:

Friday 12 October - Brown Alley, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 13 October - One22, Sydney NSW
Sunday 14 October - This Is Nowhere, Perth WA

Editor's note: There was an error in the subbing process and this article has been amended to reflect the correct information, as per the comment below.