At 7, she found a remedy for her isolation in pirate radio: Alizadeh would record golden-age rap — The Notorious B.I.G. was one of her heroes — memorize the lyrics, and dream of different, far-away lives. She moved out at 15 and spent years “just surviving,” and suddenly music helped her navigate the real world. “I bought the CD of The Velvet Rope by Janet Jackson at 16,” she said. “That was a big record for me, for getting to know myself sexually.” She was doing a lot, too: she paid her own way through school for a master’s degree in communication and a position on the Dutch youth national basketball team. “I didn't want to live the life that my past had chosen for me, because it was mostly based around suffering,” she said.

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By the time Alizadeh started to make music of her own, at 24, she was already fluent in a number of languages — Farsi, Dutch, English, French, and Portuguese. But it took a year of intense work with Mucky, her co-producer, for her sonic vocabulary to emerge. In 2015, she released two EPs, The Suspended Kid and Children of Silk, of regal, vaporous tunes about individuality, love, and disconnection. Alizadeh molds these core themes with versatility: in the video for “Amandine Insensible,” she stars as different stock characters, purposefully flat in their projections of sexuality, business, and athletics, all designed to highlight the limiting roles women are expected to adhere to. Video clips of each character are available for purchase on Shutterstock. “It's about exploring other types of presentation, outside of the imagination of capitalism, as a way to repair,” she said of the concept.