Faminine Mystique

The album is a collaboration between oOoOO and Islamiq Grrrls. The album's title - Faminine Mystique - is an allusion to the Betty Friedan book Feminine Mystique (1963) that inspired the second wave feminist movement in the US. Freidan said that while society was providing (middle class) women with historically unparalleled material abundance, it failed to allow space for personal growth. A rigid apparatus was keeping women in a narrowly defined social role that all but excluded self-exploration. Pronounced "Famine in Mystique", the album's name reflects both groups' feeling that, in a similar way, an increasingly powerful set of contemporary social forces are aligning to, on the one hand, provide people with more music and art than was made accessible before, yet rigidly limiting the types of music offered to people to sounds that favor a rigid economics first model of clicks and easy consumption over exploration and experimentation. Faminine Mystique's 13 songs are framed by fragments of lost, forgotten, or discredited 20th century artists and genres: the well-crafted guitar solos of '80s metal; jazz guitarist Barney Kessel; the "Ashley's Roachclip" drum break; Milli Vanilli; a Kool DJ Red Alert radio show barely audible on some bedside clock radio in some blue collar town on the outskirts of Manhattan; a freeform saxophone solo over a two minute, feminist juke-punk anthem; The elusively simple but dreamy vocals of a France Gall or Astrud Gilberto. All blended into the compressed sounds of modern pop and RnB.