Dania: Listless – Personal Experimental Music Shaped by Medical Night Shifts
Besides producing atmospheric electronic pieces, the Iraqi-born, Spain-based musician Dania furthermore serves night shifts as an emergency doctor. Those late-night shifts are the influence behind her latest release Listless: each of the seven songs were composed and recorded after midnight, while the cover features the slender flower of the Japanese snake gourd, a plant that only blooms after dark. However, you won't find much of the turmoil of her late-night schedule here: instead, the album exudes a serene calm that is sometimes euphoric, occasionally eerie.
Converging somewhere between trip-hop, shoegaze and atmospheric, with a touch of pop, the layered songs slink along hypnotically, driven by washes of synthesizers and, as a new element, percussion. An innovative feature to the artist's usual arrangement, they add a soft downtempo kick to a number of the tracks. The meandering, murky beat in Personal Assistant evokes the late-90s bands one group and Seefeel, while the song Car Crash Premonition is the closest things get to urgent. Written after an disturbing taxi journey to her studio late one evening, it is simultaneously contemplative and dizzying, ideal for a movie scene.
Additional songs, including one titled I Know That and another called Write My Name, are closer in style of Dania’s previous work: minimalist and formless. The closing track, named A Hunger, possesses a underwater quality, with bubbling and pinging electronics that resemble medical monitors, blended with distorted voicemail-like singing.
Dania’s soft, whispering vocal is present through almost the entirety of the record. Its words are hardly discernible as her voice are floating, repeated, layered, at points almost absent at all. Having been raised in a home where vocal expression was discouraged, she has stated that it is an activity she’s consistently considered private about. But this is also an brilliant decision, enhancing the dream-like atmosphere on this beautiful, personal album.
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