The Artist Dania: Her Album Listless – Personal Underground Pop Shaped by Medical Night Shifts
Besides producing atmospheric electronic compositions, this Iraqi-born, Barcelona-based artist Dania furthermore serves night shifts as an emergency doctor. These nocturnal hours are the influence for her new album Listless: all 7 songs were composed and recorded in the early hours, and the cover showcases the spindly flower of the Japanese snake gourd, a plant that only blooms at night. However, there is little trace of the chaos of her overnight routine here: instead, the album exudes a serene calm that is sometimes blissful, occasionally eerie.
Converging at a point between trip-hop, shoegaze and ambient, with a touch of pop, the textured tracks slink along dreamily, driven by waves of synths and, for the first time, percussion. A new addition to the artist's typical setup, these drums lend a gentle downtempo kick to several of the tracks. Its shuffling, murky beat in Personal Assistant recalls the 1990s-era groups one group and another, while Car Crash Premonition is the closest the album get to urgent. Written following an disturbing taxi journey to her workspace late one evening, it is both brooding and dizzying, ideal for a movie scene.
Additional tracks, including I Know That and Write My Name, are more reminiscent of Dania’s previous output: stripped back and amorphous. The closing track, named A Hunger, has a subaquatic quality, with bubbling and pinging sounds that resemble hospital monitors, blended with altered voicemail-like vocals.
The artist's soft, whispering vocal is featured across nearly the whole of the record. The words are almost imperceptible as her vocals are suspended, looped, layered, at points almost absent at all. Having been raised in a household where singing was discouraged, she’s said that it is something she’s consistently considered private about. But this is additionally an inspired choice, enhancing the surreal haze on this gorgeous, intimate record.
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