Dania: Nightwork

The Barcelona-based artist's new album Listless was inspired by working shifts as an emergency doctor in rural Australia

Dania Shihab is leading kind of a double life.

Born in Iraq and raised in Tasmania, the artist now spends half of the year living in Barcelona, Spain, producing and performing experimental music, and running the Paralaxe tape label.

The other half she spends in remote areas of Western Australia, practitioning as an emergency doctor in local hospitals.

Raised in a conservative Muslim family, even the fact that she is making music publicly today is the result of a long journey through instilled self-doubt and the fear of disappointing her religious parents.

With her debut album Voz (2022), Dania boldly presented her dark, haunting take on ambient and drone music to the world, centered around her own wordless, ethereal vocals.

A few years, collaborations and projects later, she has just released her newest solo work Listless, which sees her entering a new chapter of her career. While unmistakably rooted in her past sound world, she’s pivoting slightly towards a leftfield version of distorted 1990s trip-hop and shoegaze – somewhere between early Cocteau Twins and james K’s dreamy post-ambient pop.

In a certain way, Dania is also responsible for the fact you are now reading this. Back in the pandemic days, she wrote a weekly column in First Floor, the widespread electronic music newsletter of her husband, music journalist

Shawn Reynaldo

. Both First Floor and her column, cheekily called “My Wife Has Better Taste Than I Do”, inspired me massively when I started zensounds three years ago.

I was glad when Dania accepted my invitation to an interview – it truly feels like a full circle moment to me. In our extended conversation, we talked about her upbringing in a Muslim family in Tasmania, what makes experimental music truly interesting, and how her work as a nightshift doctor inspired her new album.

Dania, what are some of your earliest memories of sound?

Quite clearly it was my mother singing. She was a great singer. Music wasn’t really encouraged in our household at all. In some Muslim families, it’s seen as haram [sinful, forbidden]. But my mum was singing old Arabic songs that she remembered, or she’d make up songs – I remember there was one song that went like, “The moon is out, why aren’t you asleep?”.

You were born in Baghdad, but raised in Tasmania. How did that happen?

I was born during the first Gulf War, also known as the Iran-Iraq War. It was a terrible time, and most of my family left Iraq. They saw the writing on the wall – that things were never going to get better, and they were right. My dad was lucky enough to find a student position at University of Exeter, so we ended up in England until I was about seven.

After my dad finished his studies, we weren’t eligible to stay in England anymore, so we had to find another home. He was a fresh graduate and applied to many jobs. We were offered three places: Zambia, Germany, and Tasmania. Because the children now all spoke English, that’s how we ended up in Tasmania.

A remote island on the other end of the world…

It’s quite funny, because I don’t think we were prepared for that isolation. I remember the first time flying over, and I kid you not – I looked down and saw Tasmania, and it was empty, and I started crying on the plane, like, “There’s no one here!” It’s very sparsely populated. I was there until I was 25. There’s one very small medical school. When I went there, they had about 40 to 50 students, tops.

When I finished med school, I was like, “That’s it. I’m out of here.” I just needed to experience some culture. At the time, if you wanted to see some live music, you had to go to the local pub to see someone playing cover songs. There were very few original bands that actually came from Tasmania, or visited Tasmania.

Do you have any active memories of Baghdad?

No, I mean, I left when I was two. My parents have told me stories and I have seen photos, but no memories of my own.

Have you ever visited since then?

It’s very hard for me. I would have to travel with a male family member to feel safe. My Arabic is very poor – a result of living in the West and not having an Arab community. Going to Iraq with a foreign passport, no family there, speaking English, I don’t know if it would be particularly safe.

My father’s family live in the south of Iraq, and they’re quite provincial. Their perspective on how women should behave is very different to who I am now. I don’t think they would welcome me with open arms, not speaking Arabic, not wearing a scarf. My mother’s half is more progressive, and most of them left as refugees.

Growing up in Tasmania, did you often travel to mainland Australia?

The options were very bleak. There was one ferry to Melbourne that took six hours and was a horrible journey, because the Bass Strait that separates Victoria and Tasmania is very choppy, violent water. There was an overnight ship that could take you, but it was pricey, or at least for our family it was. There weren’t many flights, and those weren’t cheap either.

My family wasn’t very well off – we went to the mainland once together, because my parents wanted to introduce us to other Arabs. When I grew up, there was only one other Arab family on the island, two hours south of where we lived. I’d only heard a few people outside of my parents speaking Arabic, and I didn’t really experience my very own culture. So my father wanted to show us what the Arab community and culture looked like. We took a trip through Melbourne and went to some mosques in Sydney. That was one of the few times I experienced other Arabs growing up.

You mentioned your mother singing at home, but did your parents play any Arabic music around the household too?

When you leave a country during war, your access to music from that place is very limited. Like, where would you get the music from? You’d have to ask someone who is currently living in war-torn Iraq to send you some cassette tapes or CDs, and that’s really not their priority. So we didn’t have a lot of access to music. A lot of it was actually my mum singing what she remembered the songs were.

Later on, my parents moved to Oman, and that was the first time that I was really immersed in Arabic music. You have to remember, when I grew up, the internet wasn’t a thing yet. You couldn’t just go on YouTube and Google songs. But when we went to the Middle East, I was listening to Arabic music on the radio and on TV. It was incredible.

Did you get any musical training or learn instruments during your childhood and youth?

I actually learned the flute, because my father was nostalgic for an Arabic flute called the Ney, it’s his favorite instrument, he said it was the only instrument that cried. I guess he thought the Western equivalent of the ney was the transverse flute, so my father allowed me to learn that instrument. I learned that up to a fairly decent level. I’ve just lost touch with it a bit, but I’m going to go back and practice it again.

My parents weren’t all that keen – or financially able – to pay for music lessons but they bought me a bunch of books and I mostly learnt the flute by myself. I remember the first formal flute lesson I had, the music teacher was horrified, as I played Für Elise really quickly in legato. I apparently missed the chapter on tonguing the flute.

What about Western pop music? Did you hear that on the radio?

There was only one station in Tasmania, and they’d play the Top 40 songs. I’d get my tape recorder, dub the songs I liked to a blank cassette, and listen back to them. That’s probably why I still love tapes. It’s such a fond memory. To be fair, I really wasn’t allowed to listen to pop music. For my Muslim parents, a lot of the lyrics were too provocative.

I remember when I was in music class, we had to pick a song to analyse, like time signatures et cetera, and I chose a Cranberries song. So I was listening to it quite loud in my room, and my father got so angry, he just took the CD and demolished it. I love pop music, but growing up, it was sort of a delicious, forbidden treat that I wasn’t able to have all the time.

Looking at the music that you make now, it’s probably not something that your parents, as deeply religious as they were, would have approved of.

Oh no, I don’t think my parents have heard my music at all. It’s a shame that they haven’t engaged with that part of my life. It was very much a struggle to come to terms with that part of my personality. I felt that if I engaged in music, that I was committing a sin, or at least disappointing my parents so profoundly.

There was this pervasive feeling I had about music not being a worthy or an aspirational pursuit, that it was an inferior endeavor, an inferior study, that you should be focusing on real academia, like science and medicine and engineering, that these are the only worthy things to explore in life. It took me many years in fact, maybe until my late 20s, to get over that prejudice, to see that there is value in art, that my own art is actually valuable, and that I have something to contribute.

You probably made your parents proud by going to medical school and becoming a doctor. Did that enable you to make music on the side without them getting involved?

I think my mom had an inclination. I take after my mom – she was a singer. I loved hearing her sing, and I’d sometimes try to copy her. She would say to me, “Get your medical degree, then you can do music.” I thought that was a completely unrealistic, crazy idea. But what I think she meant is that music and art – especially as a brown, immigrant girl – might not be where I’d find success and financial stability.

Maybe, what she was really saying was, “Find your financial stability and your independence – and then pursue art.” And I do see value in that. Of course it’s difficult to balance medicine and music, but I’m incredibly grateful to have that financial independence so I can decide when to make music, what kind of music to make, and not worry too much about the financial implications of it. It kind of worked out for me.

You started Paralaxe Editions long before releasing your own music. So you provided a platform for others first. What made you want to start that?

I started Paralaxe with a friend many years ago, and the idea was focused on publishing beautiful objects, like books and tapes. We loved letter press printing, just the whole tactile nature of having a tape not as a throwaway but as something you could keep on your bookshelf and admire because it was so beautifully made. Then it shifted from book publishing more towards music publishing, and we found that we enjoyed that a lot more, because we enjoyed the community around the music.

When did you start making your own music?

Before the pandemic, I was kind of dabbling in music, but certainly not seriously. I was in this free jazz collective in Barcelona where we would play occasional gigs, and we would self-dub tapes. But it wasn’t something that I was focused on, or taking seriously, it was more fun- and community-driven. That changed during the pandemic, when I actually couldn’t go back to Australia to work. I couldn’t re-enter Australia for a year, so I was stuck at home [in Barcelona]. I had various instruments around, and I didn’t have any work. It felt like now or never, so I started making music. That’s when the creative dam broke.

Why did you gravitate towards experimental music, especially with your background as a kid listening mainly to tapes of top 40 radio pop songs and a few vague memories of Arabic songs your mother sang?

I learned so much from the other people in that free jazz collective. They were absolute nerds when it came to experimental music. They would be showing me records all the time, and they were very much into weird stuff. Their knowledge of music is incredible, and I’m also married to a music journalist.

I still think that this whole group of music nerds really shaped the trajectory that I went through with experimental music. It was just the language that I felt more comfortable expressing myself in, and I really wanted to use my voice, but in an interesting way. I suppose I could have made pop, but I don’t know… I think my new record is pretty poppy. Maybe I’m heading towards pop land now. (laughs)

Speaking of your husband, Shawn Reynaldo – for a while you had this great column in his First Floor newsletter called “My Wife Has Better Taste Than I Do”. I remember him writing that you tend to find the music he likes mostly predictable, boring and bland…

Well, that was a bit tongue-in-cheek between husband and wife, obviously. Shawn has excellent taste in music – I just make fun of him, and he makes fun of me. Of course I really respect his taste, but my taste tends to skew weirder and darker. He’s a music journalist, so he gets sent a lot of music and has to go through it; a lot of it is music that is accessible, that has PR behind it. I’m not a music journalist though, I just lift up a rock and find what’s underneath. I find more peculiar stuff that he’s not really exposed to, that doesn’t land in his inbox.

In 2022, your first solo release Voz came out, which focused on the human voice as an instrument. Can you talk about the idea behind it?

Well, with my background as being Muslim from quite a strict environment, it really wasn’t encouraged when I’d sing – It was very much frowned upon, and I’d have to sing in a clandestine kind of way when my dad was out of the house or in the shower. When I started to make music, I really wanted to use the most visceral and denied instrument that I had, which was my voice. It was almost like a declaration, like forcing me to say: I’m here and I’m not going back. Just to announce that I was present and that my voice was important, and there was no shame in using my voice.

You’re still more a producer/composer than a singer, because you write and create all the music on your releases. What’s your setup like?

I use a lot of different things, like organic instruments, and I’ll layer them. When I first started music, I was very anti-computer. I thought of it as almost like cheating, and I was really into modular, and trying to dub straight onto four-track tape. But the more I make music, the more I see a computer is essentially just a tool for artistic expression – nothing more, nothing less.

I’m at that stage where I do use a lot of the computer. I’m learning Max/MSP at the moment. Because I travel so much I can’t really take a lot of things with me. So when I work – because I work in very rural areas of Australia – taking modular synthesizers is just not feasible or viable. You really have to reduce your gear, and the computer becomes very important.

Who are some producers and musicians that inspire you?

Let me think… Carmen Villain is incredible. She’s actually a friend of mine, but when I dissect what she does, it’s fucking brilliant. In terms of pop music, I don’t listen to a lot of contemporary pop. I’m still stuck in the 1990s, and I sort of funnel that vibe into my work, but I don’t think like, “I’m going to sound like My Bloody Valentine today.” I feel it’s hard to answer what inspires me because I draw from such a wide palette, and every one of my releases sounds quite different.

Your new album Listless is an impressive step towards songwriting in your discography. For the first time, you are making use of drums and rhythm. Are these programmed drums by the way?

Most of them are, the only track that has real drums is “Heart-shaped Burn”, and that’s actually my dear friend Rupert Clervaux. The rest are programmed drums, basically just me learning how to program them. They’re not very complicated. I didn’t want the drums to be the focal point of the song, just to give it a bit of rhythm.

I think I wanted a lateral shift, and I didn’t really want to make more droney vocal music. I wanted to challenge myself, to see if I could move into more of a songwriting phase, rather than trying to be too academic with music. I’m still very much into sound art, and that can get very political and heavy, but this time I wanted to make something light and fun.

A couple of experimental musicians have made that shift in recent years.

Yeah, I guess it’s because when you’re a kid, or when you’re growing up as a teenager, you’re not putting on experimental music, you’re putting on pop music. So there is this nostalgic element that you’re trying to recreate, something that you’re familiar with. Even an artist like

claire rousay

, I wouldn’t say that she’s pop, but she has the very experimental Shelter Press catalog, and then some of the Thrill Jockey stuff is more ‘pop’, maybe?

Also, if you keep doing the same thing and it becomes kind of a formula, it’s not experimental anymore by definition.

The way I think about art these days is that either it’s aesthetically pleasing, or it’s executed in a very interesting way, or it really means something – whether it’s political or it has some sort of story or emotion behind it, some message that the artist wants to convey. In this phase of my life, art has to meet at least two of those three for it to mean something to me. If I hear a record and it’s just someone making experimental music that sounds okay, but it doesn’t have an interesting backstory, and it’s not made with interesting instrumentation, then I think that’s not really experimental enough for me anymore.

To be fair, a lot of experimental music can sound very similar. I think a lot of music is kind of missing the point of what being experimental means, and that it’s really about cracking the code and pushing the limits. I get so many demos for Paralaxe, and oftentimes I’m like, “What are you trying to say with this record? What is it that you’ve done differently here? Are you making your own instruments or approaching something differently? Because if not, it will have to be exceptionally beautiful.”

There’s a certain dark, ethereal, almost gothic vibe to your own sound…

Yeah, my music isn’t very fun. (laughs) I did play a gig recently in Cafe Oto, and there was an artist on the same bill called Eve Aboulkheir. She came up to me afterwards. She’s an amazing, incredible producer herself, and she said one word that maybe is a good word to describe my work – she called it “liturgical”, almost worship type music.

And I do draw influences from Arabic worship singing, but I also went to a Catholic school so there is a churchy element sometimes in my work. I am also interested in these ancient Mesopotamian sounds that I’m working on at the moment that sound very spiritual. So I felt that was a good word to describe how my music is at the moment.

What are some of the 1990s references in your music that you mentioned?

This album has got a lot of trip hop elements in it, so the obvious references would be Portishead and Massive Attack. They’re very big influences for me, but I did not really want to emulate them. It’s probably more the production aesthetic in general. On Listless, there’s a lot of distortion, and I don’t play guitar, so I had to pick up a guitar, strum it at certain notes, and then just layer so it sounds like someone playing the guitar. Some of the sounds are just things I recorded on my phone and that I put heaps of distortion on.

A lot of Listless was apparently written at night. Are you more of a night person in general?

I sleep very badly, so I’m always awake after midnight and have terrible sleep, and I work a lot of nightshift as a doctor. I’m obsessed with this idea that there’s this other world at night. You know, 90% of people around you are asleep, but then there’s this different ecology, there’s different niches, movements and communities of people that exist at night, and it’s not always nefarious or evil, it’s just a different way, another side of the coin. You see that a lot when you work nightshift – all the other people that work at night, that come to the hospital at night. It’s just a different flavor.

Some of the song titles were inspired by that, like “Heart-shaped Burn”, which was inspired by one of my patients. She was an indigenous patient, very quiet, and it took me a lot to tease out of her why she had presented to the emergency department. Her story kept changing, and eventually it transpired that she was assaulted by her partner. He’d poured hot water all over her chest, and when I was talking to her, there was a perfectly heart-shaped burn on her chest, which I pointed it out to her. At that moment, the ice completely broke. I think she understood this dark irony.

I find your mode of living and working quite interesting, working as a doctor in Australia for a few months of the year, and then being based in Spain and making experimental music for the rest.

Yeah, it took me years to find that balance. I’m quite fortunate that I’ve been doing medicine for so long that I’m what they call a senior medical practitioner, so I can dictate where I work and how long I work for, which gives me a lot of freedom. I would not be able to do music working as a full time doctor. It’s just impossible. I sort of plan my year around my artistic work. This fall, I have a few gigs and shows, so that means I’ll go to Australia to work for a few months in summer. It also means I don’t have a holiday, but I don’t really care.

I won’t lie, sometimes I do get frustrated, because I would love to be able to put medicine aside and just be a full-time artist. But for an emerging artist to survive in this climate is impossible, so I have to work. I also enjoy my work – I’m not just doing it for the money. I just have to be very organized and say no to a lot of things that you would normally say yes to.

When young artists ask me for advice, I usually tell them to get a day job. It’s not what they want to hear, but if you are not making super accessible mainstream pop music which is designed to appeal to as many people as possible, then I can’t tell you it’s a good idea to focus on music for your main income.

I totally agree. There’s no shame in getting a day job. Very few artists have that privilege or luxury of earning a living from their work. Even those that do – and I have successful friends in that category – will tell you that it’s still a struggle. It’s not fun when you need to play a shitty DJ gig at some hotel because it’s going to pay for part of your bills this month. Having a job that supplements your artistic work can be liberating.

And honestly, if you come to art or music with no life experience, no contact with people from all walks of life, not just the artistic community, then what are you making art about? Your art’s about life, so you have to live it, and one way to live it is to work and engage with people. There’s an honor, actually, in working and experiencing life and having that color your music.

Dania’s new album Listless is out on Somewhere Press now.