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.