Fatima Al Qadiri, Hito Steyerl, Juliana Huxtable

Nothing Forever opened Anthem, the vinyl series of the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. That 2016 edition was curated by the New York collective DIS, and it recast popular formats as exhibition pieces: the lightbox, the juice bar, the gym, the advertising campaign. Anthem was its pop song. Artists and musicians were brought together to write original tracks, which The Vinyl Factory pressed as a run of limited 12" singles. The executive producer was Total Freedom, the Los Angeles artist and DJ Ashland Mines. Vice described the project as a collaboration-focused compilation released in instalments over the summer, with each track also streamable on the Biennale's website. The Vinyl Factory framed the series as a reflection of the mix of art, music and fashion at the heart of that Biennale. For this first record Mines paired a composer from the club underground with a video artist and a poet from New York nightlife.

Fatima Al Qadiri wrote the music. She had released records on Hyperdub and Fade to Mind and, with Future Brown, on Warp, and she is a member of the Gulf-based collective GCC. The words are by Hito Steyerl and Juliana Huxtable. Steyerl is a Berlin-based artist and writer whose videos and essays deal with militarisation, feminism and the mass circulation of digital images. Huxtable is a New York poet, artist and DJ, co-founder of the party Shock Value and a member of the House of Ladosha. Steyerl also made the cover image, with design by the German studio Meiré und Meiré. The single piece runs just under four minutes on side A. The Vinyl Factory described a choral work that descends from a secular hymn into a dark, paranoid drone. Vice heard a song that "pairs plucked acoustic guitar with ominous choral arrangements" (2016). The first three Anthem records were launched at The Store in Berlin in early June 2016, and were also sold through the Biennale shop, Phonica Records in London and The Vinyl Factory.

This is the original Vinyl Factory 12" (VF238), pressed on 180g heavyweight black vinyl in an edition of 300 copies, with artwork by Hito Steyerl and design by Meiré und Meiré.