The Artist Dania: Her Album Listless – Personal Experimental Music Shaped by Hospital Late-Night Work
Besides crafting atmospheric digital pieces, the Iraqi-born, Spain-based artist Dania also serves overnight duties as an critical care doctor. These nocturnal hours serve as the inspiration behind her new release Listless: each of the seven songs were composed and recorded after midnight, while the artwork showcases the slender flower of the Japanese snake gourd, a species that only blooms after dark. However, there is little trace of the chaos of her late-night schedule here: instead, the album embodies a quiet peacefulness that is sometimes euphoric, sometimes uncanny.
Meeting at a point between downtempo, shoegaze and atmospheric, with a touch of pop, the layered songs glide dreamily, driven by washes of synthesizers and, for the first time, percussion. An innovative feature to Dania’s usual arrangement, these drums add a soft downtempo kick to a number of the tracks. Its meandering, hazy beat in the track Personal Assistant recalls the 1990s-era bands Scala and another, while the song Car Crash Premonition is the nearest things get to intense. Composed following an disturbing taxi journey to her workspace late one evening, it is both brooding and woozy, ideal for a movie scene.
Other songs, such as one titled I Know That and another called Write My Name, are more reminiscent of the artist's previous work: stripped back and formless. The closing track, named A Hunger, possesses a subaquatic feel, with gurgling and pinging sounds that resemble medical equipment, blended with distorted answerphone-style vocals.
The artist's gentle, murmuring vocal is present across nearly the whole of the record. The lyrics are hardly discernible as her vocals are suspended, looped, layered, at points barely there entirely. Having been raised in a home where singing was frowned upon, she’s said it’s something she’s always felt personal. But it’s also an brilliant decision, enhancing the dream-like atmosphere on this beautiful, personal album.
New Releases This Month
Bitchin Bajas stretch 4 tracks out to almost forty minutes on their album Inland See. Throughout those lengthy pieces (including an grand 18-minute-long final track), the Chicago trio deliver a further masterclass in lush, meandering minimalism, with chugging repetitions and bubbly jazz touches. Over the past ten years, Another Project (the label of Bristol artist one individual) has served as a foundation for low-end focused experimental dance music. TD10 celebrates this anniversary with twenty-three weighty, left-of-centre club cuts for any hour of the evening, including contributions from renowned producers such as re:ni, another, Pearson Sound and the founder personally. Motivated in part by personal experiences of fear of open spaces and claustrophobia, Fobia (by Other People), the recent work by Argentinian sound artist Aylu, is appropriately personal, sometimes stiflingly so. Close-contact captures of strained inhales, gulps and hums expand into intriguing but frequently lovely creations.
