DANIAILYAS is the collaborative, cross-continental project from Barcelona-based composer Dania Shihab (Paralaxe Editions), and Portland-based avant-gardist, Ilyas Ahmed (Grails member and collaborator with Liz Harris, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, and Golden Retriever). Having both previously issued solo works through Geographic North, a remote one-off collaboration soon manifested into an on-going aural dialogue, yielding the duo’s debut ‘Enough For Me To Remain.’ The album stands as a hallucinatory masterclass, charting into the theater of the uncanny—Dania's transcendent vocal melodies and cathartic synths exquisitely woven between Ilyas' mercurial guitar in some vaporous dance of beauty. A love letter scribed in blood. A bloodletting drenched in hope.
Opener “The World Spins” immediately establishes Dania and Ahmed pairing as a truly exalted engagement—a nascent collaboration with boundless potential and cosmic chemistry. It’s the best of both worlds, with Ahmed’s spidery, open-ended acoustic gestures providing the perfect backdrop to Dania’s double-tracked and echoed lyrics spoken into the darkness. The morbid mise en scène of “Be Where” creaks with diegetic gloom and deeply sullen composure, straddling the physical, astral, and ethereal plane at once.
Commencing in a blur of solemn acoustic genuflection, “Walking Through Another Door” ambles along with wordless, funereal focus. Vocally, Dania meticulously layers various vocal parts into a unified, mellifluous missive delivered with disembodied elegance and weightlessness. It’s equal parts angelic and grievous, striking a chord of heart and mind. “Breathe and Start Again” continues the emotion into more kaleidoscopic patterns, with a heaving manipulated clarinet motif turning over and over again through its habitual dance and Dania’s spectral coos floating by like storm clouds at dusk.
“The Pilgrim” ushers in an unassuming epic of dust-swept vistas haunted with spirits of yore. Beyond capturing a “cinematic” feeling, the song is essentially “pure cinema,” conjuring aural images that are both historic and timeless. In the song’s final moments, Dania’s refrain “Feeling dark again” enters the weighted darkness, bringing a flash of light and hope amidst the oblique obscurity. Closer “Coming Home” offers the most vulnerable and delicate moments on ‘Enough For Me To Remain,’ creating ample safe space to console and comfort in these weary times.
