SALT
ATLAL

dark / industrial / experimental / electronic / ambient

ذابت المدينة، تلوّحت واحمرّت بضوء شمس متطفّئة في ومضة بطيئة وهي تنزلق وراء أفق متكسّر الأشكال، تتداخل فيه ظلال أبنية تنطح غيوماً ممزّقة بأشعة برّاقة فاقعة في فتكها

"...cities that offer no sustainable existence. When the waters come in, the first waves will dissolve the salt and reduce these great glass cities to dust.”

Abdul Rahman Munif (d.2004) - explaining the title of his quintet 'Cities of Salt'.

Mleih: old name for Abu Dhabi meaning ‘salt’, likely referring to the salt flats of the emirate’s coastal region.

Atlal is a poetry of ruins. It is a sonic artefact haunted by sounds and voices culled from dead media and pulled from the aether. The opener ‘Al Khaleej’ is an elegy to Earth’s last great metropolises. A distorted vocal - a lullaby sung in an unknown language - is battered by rolling storm clouds of reverberated feedback. A doumbek beats a sombre march accompanied by a sputtering TR606 drum machine. Sour synthetic strings mourn yesterday’s tomorrow above a fizzing, dread-tinged arpeggio.

The tracks that follow evoke a world void of humanity where machines and bio-manipulations have taken on a strange life of their own. A place of discontinuities and obsolescences, of mutant, broken biotech that crawls and runs wild across the cracked, sun-blasted asphalt of ancient highways. ‘Shell’ is the sound of a plague of nanobots devouring entire city blocks. The erratic squealing modulations of ‘Bad Sector’ with its lumbering lopsided rhythm channel the angst of a metal colossus trapped in a deranged loop somewhere deep in the bowels of an underground laboratory. And at the end, the shattered, disembodied voice of ‘Shaddu’ recites Bedouin poetry as the last lights blink out and the desert falls silent.