Ask Awich about any frame of humanity and she¡¯ll tell you it¡¯s a construct. Nationality, gender, race, musical genre; they¡¯re all boxes made to codify and control us, and she¡¯s sick of them. ¡°It's just fiction,¡± she says over a video call from her apartment in Okinawa. ¡°It¡¯s something that we decided to see, but it's not there. It's not a tangible thing.¡±
The 33-year-old rapper, born Akiko Urasaki, thought about those constructs a lot as she put the finishing touches on her latest EP, "Partition"; questioning the ideas she was told to believe, holding opposing realities in her head as she created her own truth.
¡°I always had this weird ability to see myself as a story,¡± she says. As a young girl, she would stay up all night, scribbling in her notebook about themes she was too young to fully understand. ¡°My earliest poetry was like fictional love stories,¡± she says. ¡°Breaking up with somebody, somebody hurting my heart or I¡¯m hurting somebody. Being a bad girl, stuff like that.¡± Twenty years later, her latest tracks touch on some of the same topics, but she has lived expansively since then. She¡¯s been abroad, had a baby, seen beauty and agony; her experiences peek through on every record.
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