Photo: Paul Bevan
Sexwitch has been a project a few years in the making and has been getting everyone awfully excited. Everyone but Afghan-American artist Zohra Atash, who has accused the project of blatant cultural appropriation.
The project is a three way collaboration between producer-extraordinaire, Dan Carey, psychedelic rockers, Toy, Bat For Lashes' Natasha Khan. They released their self-titled album last month made up of covers of 70s folk and pysche songs Thailand, Iran, Morocco and the US.
In a new piece on The Talkhouse, Zohra Atash attacks the project for it's imperialist and militant generalisation of Asian culture. "Through the portal of six cover songs, we enter a Mean-Disney-era dystopia of imperialist, witch-burning othering where gender, cultures and archetypes are whittled down to the lowest common denominator for the sake of slapdash art".
Atash continues: “I’m fine with cultural appropriation as long as you appreciate and respect the music — even on the ‘I have a few compilations’ level". But this record is as culturally sensitive as the last time Natasha Khan homogenised a disenfranchised people by claiming some nebulous affinity with Native Americans and regularly wore feathered war bonnets and played a shaman stick live." Some pretty damning stuff.
Atash goes on to discredit the poor imitation of Eastern singing styles Khan adopts from the Zendooni compilation the record is inspired by and even further criticises the record for citing a cover of a song and getting the track title wrong.
Listen to Sexwitch's 'Heleyos' below
Sexwitch's management has yet to comment on these claims. You can read the full Talkhouse piece here.
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