SabaSaba
Unknown City

LA RECENSIONE

I became interested in "Unknown City" after a fleeting listen last summer. On a beach day, with headphones. Due to its dark nature, the listening seemed to me a great counterbalance to the heat and beach boredom: a hybrid sound magma, a contemporary transmutation of a multifaceted industrial wave. However, during subsequent listens, it was as if the initial evocative power faded: the sound monolith that had positively taken me aback at first moment obscured over time; in parallel, however, more underlying tracks of the production were revealed, useful for better understanding an album that, despite a certain monotony and predictability of arrangement, is overall well-packaged. 

The elaboration of the entire work's sound aesthetics is filtered through a broad dub lens: the expansive ambiance full of delays and echoes tends to build the pattern to which perhaps the album's title refers, an unknown city, meant in its dystopian and almost abstract sense. Unfortunately, what is missing is a glue that holds the structure together in the most delicate moments: at certain points, it feels as if some solutions might appear too easy, finding exactly what one might expect. Nonetheless, it should be noted that this work is inspired by the book "The City and the City" by China Miéville, which definitely plays in favor of SabaSaba, who, with this second release, have managed to construct an interesting piece in their journey, which sensibly fits into that vein described as Italian occult psychedelia.

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