Her visual and digital art is immensely intertwined with her work as producer. The British-Egyptian FRKTL (Sarah Badr) moves between Cairo, London and Riga. Ever since she set foot in the Latvian capital however, she found time to finish ‘Excision After Love Collapses’. A record that strangely and totally unexpectedly seems to translate the zeitgeist and absorbs the listener completely.

2020 turned into a rather prolific year for FRKTL. Apart from releasing the new album at the end of July, she also contributed a track to ‘Nisf Madeena’ and began a radio residency at HKCR (Hong Kong Community Radio).

While for most people 2020 has come to a standstill, FRKTL is as productive as ever. There’s no stopping her curating her personal SoundCloud page, where she reposts the songs and sounds she listens to and loves. Her Bandcamp finds are posted on her Instagram and selected tracks end up in her radio mixes. She seems to be producing those on a more regular basis then before. It all began with the release of ‘Excision After Love Collapses’ and hasn’t stopped yet. On the contrary. This record, albeit not that sonically hugely different from what she did before, somehow is 2020’s perfect hit. 

Excision
‘I didn’t intend for my music-making to reach the stage where I was actually releasing music.’ It’s been ten years since she first started putting her sounds on the web. In the beginning, she uploaded what she calls ‘sketches for the sake of practising my newfound hobby’, which evolved into compiling these uploads into an album, ‘Atom’. ‘That’s when I started using Bandcamp’. Without any PR-companies and journals pushing her work, she debuted in 2011 and dropped the compilation ‘B-Sides’ at about the same time. 2016 sees the release of ‘Qualia’, which is followed with ‘Prose Edda’.

But it is her 2020 release that totally seems to push her to the limelight. It’s a stunning release where you hear an artist crafting a sonic palette that sounds like a trip in electric wonderland. As one Bandcamp user puts it: ‘This is an uncompromising masterpiece of electro-acoustic music from the most consistently innovative artist in my collection.’ Indeed, she’s been doing this for years. 

Her sound touches on the entire electronic spectrum. It absorbs elements from ambient and indulges in overwhelming experimentation and gritty beats. ‘Excision’ (Sarah Badr abbreviates the title of the release to ‘Excision’ in our email-correspondence, ks) is a wonder of danceable, crackling and atonal electronics.

There’s no denying 2020 has been an odd year, with lots of artists postponing their releases or quickly dropping a soulless ambient record. It was relatively quiet the first four months of global confinement. Mid-summer in comes ‘Excision After Love Collapses’, a bombardment of emotions and feelings, which pretty much sounds like the ultimate soundtrack for life in lockdown, the silence, the anger. It’s a release that immediately sticks. ‘It’s a very personal work. It’s rooted in grief and heartbreak, coping with sudden change and loss, grappling or coming to terms with facing new realities of self and surroundings.’ 

‘I didn’t intend for my music-making to reach the stage where I was actually releasing music.’

Who would’ve thought that someone’s personal upheaval could soundtrack many’s unrest. ‘Excision’ sounds as if it is the ultimate culmination of sounds and FRKTL’s research into the sounds she has been exploring these past ten years. ‘Some of the most moving, meaningful feedback I’ve received has been about the album’s sound being “of the moment”, and I can see now how the foreboding or emotional complexity of these tracks might resonate in the current context. It would’ve been difficult to imagine a year ago that this summer would turn out the way it has, being so fraught and precarious as a period in human history.’ 

Better still, if she had gone ahead as originally planned, this record would’ve been released November last year. But her moving to Riga slowed down her schedule. ‘I was hoping to release ‘Excision’ last November, on the anniversary of ‘Qualia’, but I’d just moved the month before and it was still nowhere near where I’d wanted it to be as a body of work.’ 

Globetrotter
‘Cairo, London, Riga’, says her Twitter-bio. A globetrotter with the urge of not settling anywhere permanently, which she undoubtedly inherited from her parents. They moved from Egypt to London, where Sarah Badr was born. She grew up kind of everywhere: London, Cairo, Manama, New York,… ‘The list is endless.’ She herself traded Berlin for Riga last year. Cairo for Berlin. London for Cairo. And in between, briefly stopped in places like Beirut, Montreal and San Luis Obispo.

But it’s in London that she attends college. Before she ended up studying Computing and Interaction Design at Goldsmiths, she studied International Relations and Law.  She eventually transferred to the Creative Computing programme. ‘It was while I was at Goldsmiths that I began to explore using software for composing and producing music.’

Visuals
Her visual work closely intertwines with her music. She creates her own artwork not just for her releases, but also her online radio shows are given appropriate art. Her artistic work overflows with personality and is ‘primarily digital renders and type work, with certain elements derived from photo compositing or drawing by hand. Everything associated with FRKTL as a project, including visual work, I’ve done myself since the beginning. It’s been a very solitary endeavour and I remain ambivalent about involving labels and others more generally in my work.’

At the moment she is in the process of developing a live show for ‘Excision’. It’s still too early for her to describe how she might approach it. But it doesn’t seem wrong to assume she could be turning it into a visual spectacle that wouldn’t go wrong at Atonal or Unsound festival. ‘I’m currently in the process of developing a live show for ‘Excision’. Too early to tell how this will turn out, as it depends on some presently unknowable factors. As much as I love music that stands on its own, I’m also obsessed with sounds that go along with visual elements or choreography and so on… So perhaps this is where I’d ultimately like to fit: composing music for imagined worlds.’ 

She adds that to her it seems quite common to be both a digital artist and musician. ‘I’ve noticed many visual creatives also working with sound and vice versa, or artists generally being interdisciplinary or operating “at the intersection of” several fields.’ It is, according to her, the result of the digital economy. ‘It seems it’s no longer sufficient to focus on one thing when that thing is in such abundance and people’s time is very scarce.’ Though for an artist who’s so present online and made the digital world her own, she might be laying down a path for future musicians. 

Riga
A freelance designer by trade, Badr oozes digital wizardry. Though, she also enjoys regular walks in Latvian forests. ‘I do love nature and especially mountainous or forested regions. I’ve long had an affinity towards cooler, northern climates—in many ways antithetical to the Southern Mediterranean, but similarly rich in flora and fauna.’

On Instagram she blends curating the latest sounds with images of all the beauty she encounters on her walks. Not only does she have a soft-spot for Northern Europa, it’s more exactly Scandinavia she really adores. For ‘Prose Edda’, Badr took her inspiration from 13th century Icelandic poetry. Iceland, however, is still one of the few countries she hasn’t been to yet, though she wrote ‘see the puffins in spring’ on her bucket list. Because of her fascination for the North, she began learning Swedish as a 19-year old and spent hours digging through Nordic mythology and sagas.

Digital
It seems a huge contradiction; her love for nature and how she, in her work, be it music or visual art, distorts reality. Just as her images are digital manipulations, as such are her songs, digital manipulations. At the core of her sound are the usual instruments like guitar, violin and voice. But once turned into songs, sounds can hardly be traced back to their origin. ‘I record and arrange most of my music using Ableton Live with the Max bridge and a variety of MIDI devices and VSTs, as well as my own live recordings and custom-built instruments. A significant part of it is classical instrumentation or vocalisation which has been digitally processed or triggered, sometimes manipulated beyond the point of recognisability. With this album, I focused a lot on building instruments based on my voice and instrumental recordings, as well as field recordings.’

‘I’ve taken to controlling digital instruments in much the same way I would if sitting at the piano without a set piece to play, only in this case I use MIDI controllers while recording for extended periods. I leave a fair amount unaltered, whether it’s that or a single take of my singing or playing electric violin or guitar with pedal, or a recording from a walk someplace…  I love the spontaneity of improvisation and random overlaps that carry with them surprising moments of resolution that never cease to amaze me. This is what I’d like to continue building on in my next project.’

MENA
In response to the Beirut August 4 explosion, Ma3azef, amongst others, published ‘Nisf Madeena’ on Bandcamp, featuring a plethora of artists from the MENA-region or its diaspora. One of them is FRKTL. ‘I don’t think there’s a single person with ties to Egypt who doesn’t also have ties to Lebanon through friends and family. It was a heartbreaking, gutwrenching event with lasting repercussions—near unimaginable still in its aftermath.‘ 

Badr herself also used to live in Beirut, while working at a music technology startup. ‘Having friends in and from Lebanon whom I’ve met while living there and elsewhere, it really was the least I could do.’ Having lived in Cairo for more than a third of her life and being from Egyptian descent, she of course follows whatever happens in the region on a daily basis. ‘I still am very much linked to Egypt and will forever be, regardless of whether or not I’m living there.’

At the risk of sounding naive, the situation is such that I love listening to music and—by extension—I love making music as well.

Curating
Besides her work as a freelance designer and producer, she’s also an avid listener, constantly reposting her musical findings on Soundcloud, Instagram or Twitter. As a curator she delves through the immense amount of music on offer. At the same time, she gives her fans a nice insight in the musical background of FRKTL. 

‘I do listen to a lot of music, especially when I’m working. I regularly check the weekly Bandcamp newsletter, and I occasionally listen through the stream on SoundCloud. I’m often attracted by cover artwork or interesting release titles, besides there being many musicians and labels that I adore and follow. I regularly repost on SoundCloud and post my favourites to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Inevitably, I’ll buy anything I find myself listening to more than a few times through on Bandcamp—often it’s these purchases that wind up in my mixes for different radio shows and on my Currents playlists.’

One of this year’s biggest trends is everyone’s slow move to revenue sites such as Patreon, Medium or the newsletter-platform Substack, in order to gain money with their curating and or writing. There hasn’t really been much discussion about this trend yet, but maybe there should be. As this trend makes content less available and maybe even more exclusive where people who can’t afford it, are missing out. As such, it’s really amazing Badr hasn’t fallen for Patreon yet. ‘It sometimes seems like a tall order in hoping that people will spend money on music nowadays, much less the curation of music.’ While with her endlessly plugging songs and online mixes, it almost comes across as if it could be her dayjob.

‘At the risk of sounding naive, the situation is such that I love listening to music and—by extension—I love making music as well. My curatorial activity is a natural compulsion, one which I honestly do out of my enjoyment of these artforms. It’s been really nice to receive messages from people saying they’ve found something they’ve enjoyed through my posts, things they might not have otherwise had the immediacy or access to.’