An interview with Dania

Dania Shihab is a true polymath in every sense of the word. Born in Iraq, raised in Tasmania and currently based in Barcelona, she runs the cassette label Paralaxe Editions and has released some of the most effortlessly gorgeous ambient music of the past few years under the name Dania. When she’s not doing those things, half of the year she works as a doctor in an emergency unit in Australia. Needless to say she keeps herself busy, but fortunately she found the time to talk to me a few weeks ago. 

What are some of your earliest musical memories?

That’s a really good question. My earliest musical memories are basically my mom singing in the kitchen, I guess. My mom sang a lot of old Arabic songs, and that was really my only access really to Arabic music, because I didn't grow up in an Arab community. My dad used to sing as well, but more like country songs from the south of Iraq. But he was a terrible singer, so… [laughs]

You’ve talked previously about having a kind of rebellious phase where you wanted to reject the culture you were raised in. Did you ever circle back to that culture and come to a different understanding or appreciation of it?

Yeah, absolutely. I think every immigrant kid goes through that stage where you reject what your parents’ values. Especially because where I grew up in Tasmania, the dominant culture was the white culture. And you know, when you’re a kid, you’re trying to fit in, you’re trying to listen to the music that your peer groups are listening to. Meanwhile your mom’s stuck listening to Fairuz and Umm Kulthum, and you’re thinking “well, this is really boring old-fashioned music.” And then I think once your musical palette expands, you really do circle back and realize it’s actually really incredible music, but it takes a while to get over that sort of teenage, rebellious angst. I’m well and truly over it now.

I know your family fled the country during the war between Iran and Iraq, so I’m guessing you were a young adult when the US invaded Iraq. How did that impact you?

Of course it all impacted me in a negative way. When it all happened, I was in Tasmania. There was my family and maybe one other family in the south of Tasmania who were Arabs, and we were far from the war, so there was a sense of complete despair. I think for me, it was the vicarious trauma I had watching my parents react to it, because I’d never really lived in Iraq, but I was seeing that my parents knew this was a nail in the coffin, that they may never, ever get the opportunity to return to see their family. There were a lot of interrupted phone calls in the middle of the night with bad reception, and having to send money to people who were in need. There were a lot of cousins that I had never met because they were stuck in Iraq, left as refugees using fake passports, and thankfully now reside in England and Germany. So there were a lot of things going on, but a lot of it wasn’t my personal trauma, but trauma seeing how my family and others were immediately affected by it. For me, it was just a continuation of the status quo, like, I’d left Iraq because of a war and now there was another one, so I didn’t know a different reality . Whereas for my parents, there was this realization they’d never go home again. I think I developed a nostalgia for a place that I hadn't been to (other than being born in). I learnt that the Germans have a word for this, fernweh.

For me, I was born in 1999 so a lot of my earliest memories of understanding current events and watching the news were when the war was going on.

The news we watched at the time was very much from a Western gaze, so it was very digestible. There weren't a lot of shocking images. So there was this kind of incongruent messaging, where we would see what was going on in the news - Al Jazeera didn’t exist and there weren't really any Middle Eastern news sources - but then you’d get phone calls from my nan or my uncle saying that actually something else is going on. The way we got news was very filtered in the West. 

On your album Foreign Body I could hear elements of Arabic modal music, is that accurate to say?

Yes, I do sing and I try to use microtonal music, but obviously I like to mix both, because I am a product of both cultures. A lot of what I’ve sampled or how I sing does use microtronal systems, but no specific maqam. I know there’s maqams from Iraq, I don’t necessarily use those specific ones. I guess I’m kind of mimicking how my mom used to sing, and variations on those kinds of tonal scales. I'm not a purist when it comes to following certain systems, which might be frowned upon by traditional musicians. I've actually been reading a lot about the mix between Western and Arab music. There’s an avant-garde jazz musician I’ve been into named Amir El Saffar, who plays microtonal music with a trumpet.

The vocal elements of your music also kind of remind me of medieval/renaissance music.

It’s funny, because I actually went to a Catholic school, and I used to love singing in the chapel. I particularly loved the harmonics, even though it’s absolutely not Arabic at all, and they have very specific harmonic series. I really do love that music, a lot. I don’t know if I actively go out and seek that music, but certainly when I hear something that's choral music that uses harmonies, I am obsessed.

This might just be me, but I hear some elements of sound poetry in your music too.

I do like to use a lot of spoken word, and I actually really find language quite interesting. One of my songs on Foreign Body is “I Don't Speak My Own Language,” and that comes from the fact that I don't speak Arabic, even though I'm Arab. I like playing with words and finding languages that are not often spoken.

Recently I was doing a residency, and I had two languages that are almost extinct in Europe. One was the Tabarchino language, which is in Sardinia, and the other one is the Corsican language, which is becoming endangered. And I just became kind of obsessed. I started sampling them because I really love the idea of using words, and how when you listen to certain words, if you are completely removed from them, the way they sound, or the way it sounds to a foreigner may be different to how you associate those sounds. I was listening to a Corsican poem I recorded, and it sounds so different from French but beautiful and kind of alien in a way. It’s like sitting in between the liminal space between two worlds, which I like.

How did you end up in Barcelona?

It’s a long story, but I guess that’s why we’re here. I grew up in Tasmania, which at the time had very little music going on. If you wanted to see a band you had to go to the pub and it would be a cover band. It’s very detached from the mainland and very cost-prohibitive to travel to Melbourne to see an act that you wanted to see, so there’d very rarely be visiting musicians. I did all my study in Tasmania up until I was 25, and after I graduated I left Tasmania and moved to the Western part of Australia. There I kind of fell in with musical people, like journalists and people who did radio, and everyone kept talking about festivals in Europe. One of the festivals that kept coming up was Sonar and Primavera, and I had a few friends who had visited. So I decided to take some time off to travel and see a big music festival for the first time.

How I ended up in Barcelona was that I went to Primavera Sound, and I didn’t know anyone at the festival. But before I went, I started this really nerdy facebook group for anyone who wasn’t from Barcelona who wanted to meet up and check out some bands. I honestly thought that maybe 10 people would join, but it got massive. The group is still going on, and MTV Spain contacted me for an interview when I landed. One of the people from that group was from Russia, living in Barcelona, and she said “let’s go see a band together. They’re not playing Primavera but they’re playing at this warehouse. They’ve got a bit of buzz, they’re not super big but they’ve got an underground following.” And I was like sure, why not. So I went to this dingy warehouse where this band was playing and their bass player was shirtless and covered in tats, and I kind of fell in love. [laughs] I went home with him that night, we stayed together for two years, and I ended up just staying in Barcelona. I’m still friends with him, even though we’re not together. So yeah, that’s how I made Barcelona my home.

That’s a hell of a story!

Yeah [laughs]. It’s crazy.

You’ve mentioned previously coming up in the free jazz / free improv scene in Barcelona. Who were the main figures in that scene that made you interested in that kind of music?

The band that I saw that night was a free jazz group. It was three brothers, and they had this collective called Detakon, which in Catalan means “of the high heel”. One was the singer, one was the bass player, one had machines. I don’t think I’d even seen a free jazz band, or really knew much about free jazz before I met them. They all had this collective, there were five members, and they all had different bands. There was one that was called Murders in the Rue Morgue. Basically they all had just different formulations of bands with different people that came from the outside. That was my exposure to free jazz.

I don’t know a whole lot about the music scene in Barcelona. I know about some of the improvisers, like Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Ferran Fages, Ruth Barberán, etc.

I haven't met Alfredo, but I do know his work, and I know he's played a few shows in this old factory where I print my tapes. I think my friend Arnau Sala, who has a label as well here in Barcelona, is playing with him this weekend. There is also Alex Reviriego, and the drummer Vasco Trilla (lovely guy). 

What other labels interested you before you started Paralaxe?

I started Paralaxe ten years ago, and when I started it, I was more into the photo book scene. I was more interested in zines, and we published a few books. The person I started Paralaxe with, who was my partner at the time, he was more into music, even though I was kind of in the music scene, but the photo books were my thing.

What really inspired me mostly were local labels within Barcelona, and one of them is Anòmia, a great label run by my friend Arnau Sala. He pushes a lot of experimental, forward thinking musicians, and he's got no agenda. It's a very open platform. I used to love the way he printed, and he used this factory called L’automatica, and that made me want to publish more works, so he was a big influence at the time. I'm sure I was influenced by many other things, but that was probably more in the photo book world.

You recently put together a huge benefit compilation for Médecins Sans Frontières, which I loved. I was wondering how that came together.

I guess I'm a person where if I see that there's a problem, I really want to make some tangible difference. I felt that being a doctor and having the connections I have, I wanted to do something more than just posting things on Instagram. I think that kind of cycle of just reposting and posting traumatic pictures doesn't necessarily make a tangible difference.

I have a lot of friends that work with MSF, and I have a lot of contacts with a lot of musicians. It wasn’t that hard to reach out and say “hey, do you want to donate a song to this compilation?” Most musicians have something in their archive that they've kind of dusted off or just tweaked a little bit.

Your most recent release is a collaboration with Rupert Clervaux, which felt like a departure from your previous work. How did that come together?

I've known Rupert for a very, very long time. He said, “ Look, I have this really long drone piece. Would you like to do vocals for it?” Initially I thought I was going to do just a little bit, but I kept adding more and more and in the end it was 70 minutes long.

What does the future hold for Paralaxe?

I have something very special cooking. Ulla & Perila just finished something, it’s all mastered and ready to go and I’m just waiting for the pressing to come through. I don’t really plan out things that far ahead with Paralaxe. I have so many other things that I need to focus on. I see Paralaxe as more of a platform, rather than “ok, this year I have to have this many releases and I have to plan them out.” I do things more on a whim, like if I really want to put on a show. I’m also releasing a tape with my favourite band, Rosso Polare, a duo from Brescia, Italy. They are geniuses, it's like listening to a story when you watch them play. 

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me!

Oh, thank you. What time is it in Chicago?

Almost 9:30. I’m about to go to work.

What do you do for work?

I work in childcare and do this sort of stuff in my free time. It’s funny, I read an interview with you where you talked about how your coworkers in the emergency unit don’t really understand the kind of work you do and I can definitely relate to that.

I mean, there's been some really funny moments. I remember once someone asked to listen to my music, and I just knew that they wouldn't get it, and I played it for them and they stopped and asked “do you know Marshmello?” [laughs] It’s fine, as long as they’re amazing doctors and nurses, which they are, it doesn’t really matter that they know my music or not.

I don’t have any stories like that because I don’t even bother. I don’t talk much about my life outside of work. It’s hard enough explaining that I’m a music journalist, let alone one who writes about experimental stuff.

I know where you’re coming from. It can be a bit funny. I remember one older nurse, she’s so nice and kind of reminds me of a doting grandmother. She tapped me on the shoulder and was like “Dania, don’t worry, you’ll make it. You could be like Taylor Swift one day.” [laughs]