The Artist Dania: Her Album Listless – Intimate Experimental Pop Inspired by Hospital Night Shifts
Besides producing atmospheric digital pieces, this Iraqi-born, Barcelona-based musician Dania also serves night shifts as an emergency physician. Those nocturnal hours are the influence for her new release Listless: all seven songs were written and produced after midnight, while the artwork showcases the spindly flower of the Japanese snake gourd, a plant that only blooms at night. However, you won't find much of the chaos of her overnight routine here: instead, the album embodies a serene calm that is sometimes blissful, sometimes uncanny.
Converging somewhere amid trip-hop, ethereal rock and atmospheric, with a touch of pop, the textured tracks glide hypnotically, driven by waves of synthesizers and, as a new element, drums. A new addition to Dania’s usual arrangement, these drums add a soft slow-paced rhythm to a number of the songs. Its shuffling, hazy beat in Personal Assistant evokes the late-90s groups Scala and another, whereas the song Car Crash Premonition is the closest things come to urgent. Written following an unnerving cab ride to her studio late one evening, it is simultaneously brooding and dizzying, fit for a movie scene.
Additional tracks, including I Know That and Write My Name, are closer in style of Dania’s previous work: minimalist and amorphous. The closing track, A Hunger, possesses a underwater quality, with bubbling and pinging sounds that resemble hospital monitors, blended with altered voicemail-like singing.
Dania’s soft, murmuring voice is featured across almost the entirety of the record. The words are hardly discernible as her vocals are floating, looped, layered, at points barely there entirely. Having been raised in a household where vocal expression was discouraged, she’s said it’s an activity she has consistently considered personal. But this is also an brilliant decision, augmenting the dream-like haze on this beautiful, personal record.
Also Out This Month
Bitchin Bajas draw four songs across almost forty minutes on Inland See. Throughout those lengthy compositions (featuring an grand 18-minute final track), the Chicago trio present a further exemplary work in rich, wandering simplicity, with chugging repetitions and bubbly jazz touches. For the last decade, Timedance (the label of Bristol producer one individual) has served as a cornerstone for low-end focused experimental electronic beats. Their release TD10 marks this anniversary with twenty-three weighty, unconventional club tracks for all times of the night, including input from heavyweight producers like one name, another, a third and Batu personally. Motivated in part by personal encounters of agoraphobia and claustrophobia, Fobia (Other People), the recent album by from Argentina musician Aylu, is appropriately intimate, sometimes stiflingly so. Close-contact recordings of labored inhales, gulps and vocalizations build out into intriguing but often lovely creations.
