The Artist Dania: Listless – Personal Underground Music Inspired by Medical Late-Night Work
Besides crafting evocative electronic compositions, this Iraqi-born, Barcelona-based artist Dania also serves overnight duties as an critical care doctor. Those nocturnal shifts are the influence behind her new release Listless: all seven songs were composed and recorded in the early hours, while the cover features the slender blossom of the Japanese snake gourd, a species that only blooms after dark. However, you won't find much of the turmoil of her late-night routine here: rather, the record embodies a serene peacefulness that is at times euphoric, occasionally eerie.
Converging at a point amid downtempo, ethereal rock and atmospheric, and a hint of pop, the layered tracks glide dreamily, driven by waves of synthesizers and, as a new element, drums. A new addition to Dania’s usual arrangement, these drums lend a soft slow-paced kick to a number of the songs. Its meandering, hazy beat in the track Personal Assistant recalls the late-90s groups one group and Seefeel, whereas the song Car Crash Premonition is the nearest things get to urgent. Composed after an disturbing taxi journey to her studio one night, it is simultaneously brooding and dizzying, fit for a movie scene.
Other songs, including one titled I Know That and another called Write My Name, are closer in style of Dania’s previous work: stripped back and amorphous. The closing track, named A Hunger, possesses a underwater quality, with bubbling and beeping sounds that resemble hospital equipment, blended with distorted voicemail-like vocals.
Dania’s gentle, murmuring voice is featured across nearly the whole of the album. Its words are hardly discernible as her voice are floating, repeated, layered, at points barely there at all. Growing up in a home where vocal expression was frowned upon, she has stated it’s something she has always felt private about. Yet this is additionally an inspired decision, augmenting the surreal haze on the gorgeous, intimate record.
Also Out This Month
Bitchin Bajas draw 4 tracks out to nearly forty minutes on Inland See. Throughout those lengthy pieces (featuring an grand 18-minute final track), the Windy City group deliver a further exemplary work in lush, wandering minimalism, with chugging loops and bubbly improvisational flourishes. For the last decade, Another Project (the imprint of UK-based producer one individual) has served as a cornerstone for bass-heavy innovative dance music. Their release TD10 celebrates that anniversary with twenty-three weighty, unconventional dancefloor tracks for all times of the evening, with contributions from heavyweight producers such as one name, another, a third and the founder personally. Motivated in part by her own experiences of agoraphobia and fear of enclosed spaces, Fobia (by Other People), the recent album by from Argentina sound artist Aylu, is appropriately personal, sometimes overwhelmingly thus. Close-contact captures of strained inhales, swallows and hums expand into curious but frequently beautiful compositions.
