- A cross-genre collection of fuzzy dance floor memories.
- Karima F emerged in 2019 with an EP of polychromatic house on her Schloss label. Bubbling aquatic melodies shared spliffs with mentasm stabs, while impish IDM melodies made eyes at rolling breakbeats. It was a curious and impressive record. Her follow-up, Fief Fief, is more focused though no less eccentric, as she narrows in on a hazy form of dance music that channels rave, trance and UK funky through minimal, percussive tracks.
As abundant as they are, the genre references on this record are blurry around the edges. "Youth," for example, is nearly a UK funky track with its syncopated percussive swing, but it sounds like it's been recreated from a bootleg of a bootleg that was taped over a hardcore mix (in a good way). "Crab Ride" is similarly smudgy. The track has the trappings of a '90s breakbeat anthem, but the percussion that dominates the mix is purposely clipped and broken. More straightforward, "Sheer Rage" employs the kind of trance melody that Avalon Emerson and Nathan Micay have brought back from purgatory. But even here, Karima F dials it back, dropping the melody in favor of her echo-laden drums in the song's final third.
This record was made during a period of self-imposed isolation in the English Cotswolds in the winter of 2019. We can hear this arms-length distance from the dance floor across the record. These are tracks that sound forged in the afterglow of the morning after, dance music made from quickfires of remembrance where sounds, songs and dance floor chatter blur into one another. It's a bit like trying to describe, through foggy (and chemically altered) memory, the best party you ever went to, evoking that "you-just-had-to-be-there" warmth.
Tracklist01. Crab Ride
02. Youth
03. Sheer Rage