Sabiwa - DaBa (2019)

DaBa is the new album from the Taiwanese, Berlin-based audio-visual artist Sabiwa. It explores the space between dreams and virtual reality, created both for use and consumption of the user.

As with our relationship to technology and fantasy, the album veers between seduction and repulsion. The intimate There is Nothing Real recalls the wondrous, textural sonic worlds of Bjork and the warm, muted tones of 90s trip-hop.

But the whispered, dream-like lyrics and samples from the natural world contrast with jabbering, scrambled, processed vocal loops as the album progresses, before the record contorts and dissolves into uncanny videogame glitches, reaching a grinding industrial crescendo during Enigma reminding horror movies soundtracks.

Patching together different dimensions and sonic spaces, DaBa creates a virtual landscape floating between primordial evocations, prayers and hyper-processed concrete sounds, dissolving with the rhythmic clicks and gasps of the album’s title track. “DaBa is the blurred moment when I wake up from a dream,” says Sabiwa, “And I don’t understand if it is me or not.”