Hazy dreamscapes blur into head-nodding boom bap, decolonial feminist remixes meet philosophically dense rap flows, and reverberating bass lines fuse with nomadic folk tunes that have circulated between now geographically disparate land masses.

At its core, Hurrian Cult Legacy is about resisting island mentality, both in terms of the individual self and of nationalistic tendencies, and finding alternatives to ‘us’ and ‘them’ narratives that use othering to weaken international solidarity against abuses of power. On the peripheries, meandering improvisations and pulsating dance rhythms branch out into estuaries of genre-bending connections and cultural exchanges.

Its treatment of recorded sound, samples and melodic references is as conceptually rigorous as its lyrical content with feature verses from her partner of 15 years, Nobull (of Newcastle hip-hop groups Verbal Terrorists and Lucid Giants) as they draw upon ideas from:

Deleuze: ‘As the AI combines with the biometrics, machines driving machines into a dialectic, I’m anti-Oedipus, see that the greed’s deceiving us’;

to Susan Sontag: ‘Can you freeze a moment and own it, in what sense, 360 degrees, it’s locked yet, if deemed cyclical then what’s next?’

as well as Hannah Arendt, bell hooks, and Bertrand Russell.

Combining multi-instrumentalism, improvisation and the socio-aesthetics of remix culture, she plays flute, piano, hurdy-gurdy and guitar to then sample and de-construct, in line with her ongoing artistic interest in self-erasure, disappearance and impermanence. The re-wiring of assumed fixed mediums (recording, writing) revealed to be transient, flexible and subject to the decay of time.

The album name signals back to what is thought to be the oldest surviving example of notated music, located in present-day Syria. From highlighting the significance of these inscribed clay tablets in cuneiform script, to recurring references to Mesopotamia (a historical region covering parts of Iraq and eastern Syria, and that etymologically stems from the meaning ‘land between rivers’ or mesos, ‘middle’ and potamos, ‘river’), the album serves as a reminder to contemporary Britain what it owes to cultural and artistic expression in West Asia, and a historical ego-check to the Western-biased constructions of superiority, progress and originality.

This underpinning goes on to shape the album’s critique of linear time, its embracing of liminality and relationships that transcend borders, and how music and sound can be used as resistance against the divisionary tactics of racism, sexism and socio-economic oppression.