If you haven’t heard of Sara Abdel-Hamid, aka Ikonika, the rising female force from the dubstep game, then you will soon. Her debut album Contact, Love, Want, Have was released on 6 April.

The young producer was raised in west London by her Egyptian father and Filipino mother. Her sound is fresh and unique and brings new dimensions to the dubstep movement. Sara’s first involvement in the music industry is unusual for someone now creating electronic dub, she was a drummer in a number of hardcore and metal cover bands. This then led to her moving onto production, where she enjoyed messing around with hip hop and dubstep, before settling on the latter, crafting an innovative sound, using mashed-up rhythms, quirky melodies, heavy synth action, and squeaks and bleeps, that are becoming evermore prominent in the music composed by contemporary artists belonging to the ‘PlayStation generation’.

Her stage name, Ikonika, was given to her by her boyfriend, according to an interview she gave to The Guardian. He thought the name was apt due to her music’s “iconoclastic, boundary-smashing properties.” It is because of these ‘properties’ that her music is turning heads, and as a result, the artist has been subject to the typical barrage of media attention that goes with early success. In the interview she explained how she is already fed up with people using her background to label her in typically stereotypical fashion, “Some little blog called me the MIA of dubstep”. She added, “Is it a Hounslow thing or to do with the colour of my skin? It’s not the music. People have called me a Muslim producer because of my surname. I’m not even a Muslim. Would they call Skream a white, male, Christian producer? I hate this ‘first lady of dubstep’ s**t. Do they think I go around consciously thinking about my gender? I’m trying to see the funny side of it, though.”

Contact, Love, Want, Have is out now on Hyperdub.

http://myspace.com/ikonika

Tags: Dubstep, Ikonika