Łabandzi Śpiew: experimental pop

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Julia Sabra and Fadi Tabbal - Snakeskin (2022)

środa, 5 listopada 2025

Snakeskin - We Live in Sand (2025)

It's been already some years since I posted about Julia Sabra, my favourite Lebanese artist who makes her name as a vocalist in Postcards but also as half of a music duo with Fadi Tabbal. The title of the album they debuted as a duo became the name of the project, but the music stays the same: more experimental than Postcards, but still fairytale-ishly ethereal.

The music here is different from your ordinary dream pop charmers' sounds. The glitchy, the uncomfortably noisy and a bit industrial meets the airy and wavy in the best way possible. It makes the skin crawl a little, but, before it gets too much to bear, it gets ironed over with some beautiful guitar sounds. Or flute. Or cute electronica. But at the same time, it's also very much minimalist: there doesn't have to be much to create the atmosphere and the duo proves it over and over again. The vocalizations in Olive Groves is joined by pipe organ-like sounds and not much more and that's just an example.

But everything here is glued together by Sabra's ethereal vocals. This is deceptive, however, as the beauty of the vocals is counterbalanced by the gravity of the lyrics, commenting on the situation in Lebanon loomed over by the never-ending Near East war. "It’s a stunning paradox — a song about birth, caught in the middle of destruction. Hope, fragile and flickering, seeps through the rubble. Snakeskin has always thrived in extremes, but here the contrast is sharpened to a knife’s edge". It's true, but it's also true that the third album from the duo is their darkest yet but seeing how the situation in the region develops, it may not be the darkest in general.

We Live in Sand costs 10 USD.

Check: Olive Groves

Country: Lebanon

Genre: experimental dream pop

Label: Ruptured / Beacon Sound

Postcards - After the Fire, Before the End (2021)

wtorek, 28 marca 2023

Bianca Scout - The Heart of the Anchoress (2023)

The London-based Bianca Scout has been making music for almost a decade now. This year she showed her new album called The Heart of the Anchoress and it makes perfect nutrition for the art-oriented parts of our souls.

Her music is certainly a kind of ambient pop, but unlike artists like Midwife, it is not based on grainy noise, but highly experimental electronica. Bianca Scout admits that her compositions have to be utterly transformed (twisted, teased, pruned and nurtured) from the way they look at the beginning to their final forms. The angelic voice of the artist is accompanied here by a variety of electronic sounds, artful instrumental bits and oneiric backing vocals. Everything resembles a very detailed collage of elements that alone don't mean much, but together are truly beautiful. Except for the pipe organ-based ones, they'd look fabulous alone as well, no doubt about it. No wonder that her tracks are called "mantra-like songs succeed in opening portals to heavenly vistas, where scenes of golden-hour/after-hour intimacy softly unfold".

The Heart of the Anchoress costs 8 EUR (7 GBP).

Check: Dedicated Two

Country: UK

Genre: art ambient pop

Label: First Terrace Records

środa, 22 marca 2023

Nac/Hut Report - Absent (2023)

With already their 7th album, the Kraków-based Nac/Hut Report continue to develop their very unique style that marries dream pop-atmosphere with experimental ambient electronica. Absent makes yet another extremely interesting album in the offstream landscape of Poland.

Brigitte Roussel is the singing part of the duo and her voice is utterly oneiric and atmospheric. It always sound like something that appears on the verge of a dream, difficult to decipher but enriching the mesmerizing ambiance of the compositions. Anyone who attended any of their shows knows how focused Roussel and Li/ese/Li are while working on their experimental ambient music. This music manages to be melodic and catchy while undoubtedly representing the very experimental part of the electronic music that directly borders with drone and noise genres.

The artists sprinkle this outstanding mode of operation with a captivating idea on this particular album on which "All music has been extracted from shortwave radio interval signals from different international broadcasters" named in the track titles (from Korea and Uzbekistan to Poland and Slovakia). This alone makes it even more mysterious and difficult to pass on.

Absent costs whatever you want to pay.

Check: 702 KHz, Radio Stockholm

Country: Poland

Genre: experimental ambient pop

Label: Crunchy Human Children Records

czwartek, 10 listopada 2022

Julia Sabra and Fadi Tabbal - Snakeskin (2022)

This blog knows Julia Sabra as the vocalist of the Lebanese dream pop outfit Postcards. But she makes music under her own name too. Recently she joined forces with her compatriot, electronic/ambient music creator, Fadi Tabbal, in order to create a unique record called Snakeskin.

In their music, the artists combine Sabra's ultimately dreamy vocals and Tabbal's experimental electronica into non-obvious compositions. Already the first song here, Still Life, surprises the audience with crunchy samples that are everything but soothing to ears but yet, sounding very well together with Sabra's angelic voice. Later, the compositions get much more flow with the industrial flavours planted all around them. But really, this album is very difficult to attempt any kind of labeling with neoclassical ambient pieces like Past Tense, the unnervingly dark In Our Garden or the hazy dream of One by One. Practically speaking, each song is a different story with different vibes and emotions. And everything makes one whole glued together by the vocals and the melancholic aftertaste.

Snakeskin costs 8 USD.

Postcards - The Good Soldier (2020)

Check: One by One

Country: Lebanon

Genre: dreamy experimental pop

Label: Ruptured Records/Beacon Sound

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poniedziałek, 7 listopada 2022

Anna Arrobas - Made to Touch (2022)

Anna Arrobas, a Montreal-based artist, creates some hauntingly beautiful ballads that reside somewhere within the experimental art pop genre. Together with her band, the Canadian released her first album last month and it's a real deal of the moody,

The Opener in Heart of Stone makes a beautiful promise for this album to be as moody as it is emotional and, simply, beautiful. However, from my experience, many artists like opening their albums this way, as a sort of an ornament, and then proceed with more mainstream pop content. Not this time though, as Arrobas continues with her atmospheric, nearly ambient pop. She uses her soft voice, additionally dispersed in a very dream pop manner, to lead us through this nostalgic and gloomy art realm. There's no doubt that her slow-paced compositions are meant to be very much of the experimental nature. The accents are put on creating the eerie but also enchanting atmosphere, rather than being particularly catchy or melodic.

In this way, it is very ambient pop-like, there's, however, more to the instrumental side of the project. There's both guitar and synthesizer sounds, not to mention a guest accordion from time to time, but the music is still far from being overwhelming. The subtle backgrounds make it clear that in this art pop, art is more important than pop. And no song is a better example of this than the spoken word-filled Vœu that closes the album.

Made to Touch costs 7.5 EUR (10 CAD).

Check: Vœu

Country: Canada

Genre: dreamy art pop

Label: Éditions Appærent

środa, 5 stycznia 2022

Mariuk - Blue Days (2021)

Mariuca García-Lomas is best known as the vocalist in Northwest, the London-based experimental and artsy project I posted about almost three years ago. At the end of the last year, the Spanish artist released her solo album Blue Days and it's a real dose of ambient pop magic.

The story of this album is very inspiring. Back in 2020, García-Lomas made a public declaration to learn how to play guitar and prove it by releasing a single every month. This album consists of 12 tracks so the artist proved to be successful in her challenge. And although the songs are not recorded in brilliant quality, they create unique, very intimate atmosphere; nothing brings an artist to their audience so much as small mistakes and imperfections that have to be battled with. This resulted in an ambient pop and quite noisy album that makes me think of Grouper or Midwife but with some of Northwest's very artistic vibes.

When describing the process of creating this album, García-Lomas mentions how difficult 2020 was and how she faced existential crises and it's well visible on the release. It's no coincidence that the first song's title is literally Sad and the artist doesn't shy away from singing about the most traumatizing things ("How could you not feel sad?/I'm afraid of dying all the time" or the one of being Almost 30 (that's depressing, I'm already past that)). But this sadness gradually gives place to very much more hopeful tones with The World Is Yours as their pinnacle. It just shows that the album portrays more than just one evolution of the artist.

Blue Days costs 3 EUR.

Northwest - II (2019)

Check: Hunger

Country: Spain/UK

Genre: noisy ambient pop

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Dear Laika - Rinzen (2018)

czwartek, 2 grudnia 2021

Dear Laika - Pluperfect Mind (2021)

Isabelle “Izzy” Thorn creates some very experimental, noisy and artful pop music and she does it a lot: in the last four years, she released seven longer albums and one of them, Rinzen from 2018 was one of the shiniest gems on my blog that year. This time, the British artist comes back with perhaps the most nuanced and complex album called Pluperfect Mind.

Her music is strongly affected by her avant-garde approach to music. Thorn uses difficult melodies sown up from various matters into a chaotic and very atmospheric whole glued together by her unbelievably airy but poignant voice. There's next to everything in her music: electronic subtlety, harsh noise, instrumental randomness, choir appearances and, the most important part, mystery and uniqueness of its high-art theatrical style. It's not one to have fun to or to pick up melodies from; it's more like sounds for lonely and careful admiration. It's not music, it's "a beautiful and singular oddity which exists in the liminal space between dreamworlds and a blurry, watercoloured version of reality".

This is not an easy music but this was not meant to be either. It's very fitting as it talks about things that are not easy either. The main theme of the album is isolation, a topic so very well known right now, but it's also about Thorn's experience with being a trans-gender person. It is painful and poignant and lines like the one from Ubi Sunt (yawning ocean/ of days adrift and calm/ catatonic, watching sundown/ tremble against the wall/ washed out and faint/ i wait for nightfall) describe the lonely times of depression so accurately and poetically at the same time. This album's release is one of the biggest events this year.

Pluperfect Mind costs 10 USD.

Check: Asleep in Wildland Fire

Country: UK

Genre: avant-garde pop

Label: NNA Tapes

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wtorek, 21 lipca 2020

Ben Shemie - A Single Point of Light (2020) EN

Ben Shemie is the vocalist and guitars of the fantastic Suuns. But it turns out that he makes music also solo and this year released the second album under his own surname. So it's time to catch up and have a look at A Single Point of Light.

The album "focuses on the perception of light, both figuratively and literally (...), how we can all see the same thing but perceive it differently". Every fan of Suuns should instantly recognize the band's unique style in Shemie's works: similar electronic effects, minimalism of form that bring maximum artistic value, dark vibe. The album was "recorded in one day, all live off the floor, with no overdubs" which only makes the feeling of minimalism and lo-fi magic deeper. The examples here are numerous: based on the nervous beeping Ties That Bind, very much Suuns-like vibrating backgrounds in Change or the album's finish in the electronically massacred ballad The River.

Great idea was to interlace more traditional, if you could even call them that, songs with tracks that create electronic bridges between them. In this way the melodic compositions seem to be lost within this electronic hotchpotch so the listener has to dig for them which makes a really satisfying job.

A Single Point of Light costs 7 EUR.

Sprawdź: The River

Kraj: Kanada

Szufladka: electronic minimalwave
Label: Hands in the Dark

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Bem Shemie - A Single Point of Light (2020) PL

Ben Shemie to oczywiście wokalista i gitarzysta fantastycznych Suuns. Okazuje się jednak, że tworzy również solowo, a w tym roku wydał już drugą płytę pod swoim nazwiskiem. Czas więc nadrobić zaległości i przyjrzeć się A Single Point of Light.

Płyta "skupia się na odbiorze światła, zarówno dosłownie jak i w przenośni (...), w jaki sposób wszyscy widzimy tę samą rzecz lecz odbieramy ją inaczej". Każdy fan Suuns od razu rozpozna w pracach Shemiego niepowtarzalny styl zespołu, podobne elektroniczne efekty, minimalizm formy przynoszący maksymalne wrażenia artystyczne, mroczny vibe. Artysta płytę "nagrał jednego dnia, na żywo, bez żadnych dogrywek", co pogłębia wrażenie minimalizmu i lo-fi'owej magii. Przykłady można mnożyć: oparte na nerwowym pikaniu Ties That Bind, bardzo suunsowe wibrujące tło w Change, czy zamykająca album zmasakrowana elektroniką ballada The River.

Znakomity efekt daje przeplatanie bardziej tradycyjnych, jeśli można o tym w ogóle pisać, piosenek kawałkami tworzącymi między nimi elektroniczne pomosty. Daje to efekt zagubienia melodyjnych kompozycji wśród eksperymentalnego misz-maszu, przez co każdy musi się do nich dokopać, a jest to nadzwyczaj satysfakcjonujące zadanie.

A Single Point of Light kosztuje 32 złote (7 EUR).

Sprawdź: The River

Kraj: Kanada

Szufladka: electronic minimalwave
Label: Hands in the Dark

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środa, 4 marca 2020

A CASA - Un pozo en el sol (2020) EN

A CASA is a solo project from José de Diego from Mendoza, Argentina, who on his new album called Un pozo en el sol showed some really interesting and complex electro dream pop.

There's so much going on on this album. The majority of the sounds is made of lively electro-pop vibes decorated with more or less dream pop vocals, but there are also such genre-deviations as almost metal voices in He Mirado Atrás, very impressive electronic closure of Hoy no, or featuring Agustina Bécares whose vocals make the album even more diverse. Not to mention the monumentally electronic finish in the two-part track Coty3.

But the most important is how easy it is for the artist to combine catchiness and atmosphere-building, especially when it comes to my favourite track, one of the entirely new compositions (some other are reimaginations of older songs), Contaba - who would guess that a song with a chorus about counting to six in Spanish could be what I needed to be happy?

Un pozo en el sol costs 7 USD.

Check: Contaba

Country: Argentina

Genre: electro dream pop

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A CASA - Un pozo en el sol (2020) PL

A CASA to solowy projekt José de Diego z argentyńskiej Mendozy, który na swojej nowej płycie Un pozo en el sol pokazał niezwykle ciekawy i kompleksowy electro dream pop.

Na płycie dzieje się bardzo dużo. Przeważają żwawe elektroniczno-popowe klimaty okraszone mniej lub bardziej dream popowymi wokalami, ale zdarzają się też takie eskapady gatunkowe jak prawie metalowe wokale w He Mirado Atrás, bardzo elektroniczny finisz Hoy no, czy udział Agustiny Bécares, której wokal urozmaica album jeszcze bardziej. Nie mówiąc już o monumentalnie elektronicznym finiszu w dwuczęściowym Coty3.

Najważniejsze jednak jest jak łatwo muzykowi przychodzi łączenie przebojowości z klimatycznością, zwłaszcza jeśli chodzi o mój ulubiony kawałek, jeden z zupełnie nowych kompozycji (część to przeróbki starszych utworów) Contaba, kto by przypuszczał, ze piosenka o liczeniu do sześciu może być tym, czego potrzeba do szczęścia?

Un pozo en el sol kosztuje 28 złotych (7 USD).

Sprawdź: Contaba

Kraj: Argentyna

Szufladka: electro dream pop

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