Dania: Listless – Intimate Underground Music Shaped by Hospital Night Shifts
Besides crafting evocative digital pieces, the Baghdad-born, Barcelona-based musician Dania furthermore serves overnight duties as an emergency doctor. These late-night hours are the influence for her latest release Listless: each of the 7 tracks were composed and produced in the early hours, while the artwork showcases the spindly flower of the Trichosanthes cucumerina, a plant that only blooms at night. But, you won't find much of the turmoil of her overnight routine here: instead, the record exudes a quiet peacefulness that is at times euphoric, occasionally eerie.
Meeting somewhere between trip-hop, shoegaze and ambient, with a touch of catchy melodies, the textured tracks slink along hypnotically, propelled by waves of synthesizers and, as a new element, drums. An innovative feature to the artist's typical setup, these drums lend a gentle slow-paced rhythm to a number of the songs. The meandering, murky rhythm in the track Personal Assistant evokes the late-90s bands one group and another, whereas Car Crash Premonition is the nearest things get to intense. Composed after an unnerving cab ride to her studio one night, it is simultaneously brooding and dizzying, fit for a movie scene.
Other tracks, such as one titled I Know That and Write My Name, are closer in style of Dania’s past work: stripped back and amorphous. The final song, A Hunger, has a subaquatic quality, with gurgling and beeping electronics that resemble hospital equipment, interwoven with distorted answerphone-style singing.
Dania’s gentle, whispering vocal is featured across nearly the whole of the record. Its words are hardly discernible as her vocals are suspended, looped, stacked, sometimes almost absent at all. Growing up in a household where vocal expression was frowned upon, she’s said that it is something she has always felt personal. Yet it’s also an brilliant decision, enhancing the dream-like haze on the beautiful, personal album.
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Bitchin Bajas stretch 4 songs out to nearly 40 minutes on their album Inland See. Throughout those lengthy pieces (including an epic 18-minute-long final track), the Chicago group present another exemplary work in lush, wandering minimalism, with steady loops and bubbly improvisational flourishes. Over the past ten years, Timedance (the label of UK-based producer one individual) has been a foundation for low-end focused experimental dance music. Their release TD10 marks that anniversary with 23 weighty, unconventional club tracks for all times of the night, including contributions from heavyweight producers such as re:ni, another, Pearson Sound and the founder personally. Inspired partly by her own encounters of agoraphobia and claustrophobia, the album Fobia (Other People), the recent work by Argentinian musician Aylu, is suitably personal, sometimes stiflingly thus. Proximity captures of strained inhales, gulps and vocalizations expand into curious but frequently lovely compositions.