From OVO to IOBIONICS, Mudasser Ali Talks Billie Eilish & Sustainability

Mudasser Ali is a Creative Director from Toronto, Canada that’s continuously in-demand. Living in a city where information workers have become a commodity, he’s worked with XO’s 88Glam in their early stages and then soon after, found OVO/Warner artist Roy Woods on Soundcloud and Creative Directed him to new heights from 2014 – 2019. Releasing his HOMBRE-X label at the end of last year, he’s clearly heading towards the design end of things. We caught up with the maverick intellectual, writer and designer to get his thoughts on what’s going on in 2020.

Photo Credit: James Ellis

What’s your mind telling you these days?

Data Science is still the benchmark for ultimate success, in my opinion. Sustainability and building a great system is the next archetypal challenge for humans. We have very little sense of civilization anymore, capitalism and the dumbing of the masses took that from us. We have an even weaker sense of what to do with the layers of experiential knowledge that we still have a temporary window to process. As long as we have people that can culturally curate a narrative, we tend to get lazy about the value of raw intellectualism. Our ancestors were nowhere as mentally agile as us to even make a dent in the universe of psycho-social information we have access to. They left us with very little in terms of mental undergirding that would help us evolve through the binary culture bridge we occupy now. They wouldn’t know the first thing about handling response algorithms on 25+ timelines a day.

You just finished a 5 year Creative Director stint with Roy Woods. How was that?

Roy reminds me of an athlete that makes it into the lottery because of the composite of his skills as opposed to one clear strength. Without intellectual guidance and a clear sense of operational hierarchies, even great talents tend to fade. My experience with OVO has always been beautifully crafted and subtle in execution, lots of money was made on all sides. Sustainability is still an overriding factor over there which is absolutely the right way to go about natural growth.

What’s your most preferred mode of expression design, writing or curation?

Writing is still the rarest thing on earth. Some of the greatest minds we can’t seem to get over like Nietzche weren’t designers or curators, they were writers. A writer can create a world and destroy it quickly, an exhilarating sense of design freedom in my opinion.

What are you excited about?

I’m excited that we’re about to enter a new era of Green Awareness. Billie Eilish for me is a great example of what I mean by that, an eco-friendly tour, sustainable Collab with H&M. As a teenager, her sense of awareness about the world we live in has to be a good thing.

Pictured: Billie Eilish

You’re always ahead of the curve. What do you see happening in 2020.

Our sense of underground is dead so my feeling is that we’re investing our intellectual power as a society towards smart green technology. We have to be realistically sustainable as opposed to just pretending to care about the Earth. Sidewalk Labs by Google and IOBIONICS are two local projects in 2020 that I think will change Toronto forever. I’m just happy our Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is putting his stamp of approval on Canadian Smart Green Innovation companies in Ontario. I expect this sort of top-notch intellectual leadership from the Liberal Party.

Any designers you’re fond of?

Isaac Saqib, Lonely Labs, RDCL, Love Closely, Gab3, Jabari Khalid, Raf Simons.

Releasing any music this year?

Shitloads of ultra-themed playlists. Intellectualism on Overload, a Punjabi Playlist maybe. I have albums of electronic music ready but realistically i’m not releasing original music until 2021, the world is in a state of chaos, either you’re adding to it or you’re ducking from the bullets, no time for my subtle art unless the wavelengths align.

Follow Mudasser Ali on Instagram, Twitter & Spotify to stay up-to date on his work.