The Artist Dania: Listless – Personal Experimental Pop Inspired by Hospital Night Shifts
In addition to crafting atmospheric electronic compositions, the Baghdad-born, Barcelona-based musician Dania furthermore works overnight duties as an emergency physician. These nocturnal shifts serve as the inspiration behind her latest album Listless: all 7 tracks were written and recorded in the early hours, and the artwork features the slender blossom of the Trichosanthes cucumerina, a plant that only blooms at night. However, there is little trace of the chaos of her late-night schedule in this music: instead, the album exudes a serene calm that is sometimes euphoric, sometimes eerie.
Converging somewhere amid downtempo, ethereal rock and ambient, with a touch of pop, the layered tracks glide dreamily, propelled by waves of synthesizers and, for the first time, drums. An innovative feature to the artist's typical arrangement, these drums add a soft downtempo kick to a number of the songs. The meandering, murky beat in the track Personal Assistant evokes the 1990s-era groups Scala and another, while the song Car Crash Premonition is the nearest the album come to urgent. Composed after an disturbing cab ride to her workspace late one evening, it is both contemplative and woozy, ideal for a movie scene.
Other songs, such as one titled I Know That and another called Write My Name, are closer in style of Dania’s previous output: stripped back and amorphous. The final song, named A Hunger, possesses a subaquatic quality, with bubbling and beeping sounds that sound like medical equipment, interwoven with distorted answerphone-style vocals.
Dania’s soft, murmuring voice is present through nearly the whole of the album. The words are hardly discernible as her voice are suspended, repeated, stacked, sometimes almost absent at all. Having been raised in a household where singing was discouraged, she has stated that it is an activity she has always felt private about. But this is also an inspired decision, augmenting the dream-like atmosphere on the gorgeous, personal album.
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