The Artist Dania: Her Album Listless – Intimate Experimental Music Shaped by Hospital Late-Night Work
Besides crafting evocative digital compositions, this Baghdad-born, Spain-based artist Dania also serves night shifts as an critical care physician. Those late-night shifts serve as the inspiration for her new release Listless: each of the 7 tracks were composed and produced after midnight, while the artwork features the slender blossom of the Japanese snake gourd, a plant that only blooms at night. However, you won't find much of the turmoil of her overnight schedule here: rather, the album embodies a quiet peacefulness that is at times blissful, occasionally uncanny.
Meeting at a point between downtempo, shoegaze and atmospheric, and a hint of catchy melodies, the layered songs glide dreamily, propelled by waves of synths and, as a new element, percussion. A new addition to the artist's typical arrangement, they add a soft downtempo kick to several of the tracks. Its shuffling, murky beat in Personal Assistant evokes the late-90s groups one group and Seefeel, whereas the song Car Crash Premonition is the closest the album come to intense. Composed after an disturbing taxi journey to her studio late one evening, it is simultaneously contemplative and dizzying, fit for a movie scene.
Additional songs, such as one titled I Know That and Write My Name, are closer in style of the artist's previous output: minimalist and formless. The closing track, named A Hunger, has a subaquatic feel, with bubbling and pinging electronics that sound like medical equipment, blended with distorted voicemail-like singing.
The artist's gentle, whispering vocal is present through nearly the whole of the record. Its words are hardly discernible as her vocals are floating, repeated, layered, sometimes almost absent at all. Having been raised in a home where singing was frowned upon, she’s said that it is an activity she has always felt private about. Yet this is also an brilliant choice, augmenting the surreal haze on the beautiful, intimate record.
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