Desert Strike (EP)

Desert Strike is the third extended play of Kuwait musician Fatima Al Qadiri. The record is based on Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf (1992), a video game that in turn is based on events of Operation Desert Storm of the Gulf War. As a kid who lived in Kuwait during the Gulf War, Qadiri played the game a year after it took place, which messed with how she remembered experiencing the actual war. Given how dark the game portrayed the Gulf War, she intended the extended play to represent a positive and "innocent" view of it by pairing a palette of childlike sounds with war sound effects. Released on 23 October 2012 by the label Fade To Mind, Desert Strike garnered generally favorable reviews from professional music journalists and landed on Spin magazine's list of the "Best Dance Albums of 2012."

Concept

Fade to Mind's press release for Desert Strike described the extended play as "the synthesis of terror and child-like wonder, to the strategies of imagination and gaming." The EP is based on Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf (1992), a video game for the Sega Genesis which in turn is based on events of Operation Desert Storm of the Gulf War. She played it a year after she experienced the war personally while living in Kuwait. Playing the game messed with her memories of what she really experienced during the war. Qadiri explained, "it really messed me up in the head, because I was just like ‘how does this exist in a format that I can play?' I couldn't even describe how disturbing the feeling was."

As a kid, in order to "take hold" of how Qadiri remembered the war, she used a Casio keyboard to perform melodies that made fictional worlds and "war games" for her and her sister to be involved in. Similarly when she was an adult, given the dark way the game viewed the war, Qadiri wanted the EP to present a more positive, "deep," and "innocent" perspective of the event. As Dummy explained, "Desert Strike as a game gave the children the sickening power of being able to see their situation from another, jarring perspective, and so 'Desert Strike' as an EP tries to make that active participation something that is actually positive and empowering, rather than a sinister role reversal or trivialisation of a tragedy." Some journalists and Qadiri herself have categorized Desert Strike as a major part of a phenomenon coined by writer Sophia Al Maria as "Gulf Futurism."

Composition

While technically based on the video game of the same name, Desert Strike is completely devoid of what Qadiri described as the "ugly" and "unsettling" tone of the game's soundtrack.