(2021) Obay Alsharani - Sandbox


Review:
As striking as Obay Alsharani’s personal history is, the music on Sandbox is even more so. Knowing who Alsharani is and how he got to his current situation certainly adds tone and shade and context to these lambent, gem-like miniatures, but the songs don’t necessarily need those for impact; one can play “Northern Lights” and be transported to the kind of timeless, eternal present that some ambient and drone music can produce in the listener without actually knowing how exactly Alsharani found himself north of the Arctic Circle, directly inspired by the aurora borealis. While Sandbox is Alsharani’s debut record, it’s not the first or even the first type of music he’s made. The 30-year-old Syrian’s Soundcloud still has some of the early, promising “Arabic Beats” tracks he put up under the name Khan El Rouh. The short version of how he got from that sound to the gracefully lower fidelity luminance of Sandbox involves having to flee from Syria, winding up in Sweden in a small town very far North waiting to hear about his (eventually successful) asylum application. Alsharani had already started to be influenced by acts like Boards of Canada and Minecraft soundtrack composer C418 (the sandbox-like freedom of that game being something Alsharani found a necessary reprieve from the level of attempted control in Syria) before he went to Sweden, but there the artistic creation that had long been a source of solace developed into the more enveloping, melancholy sound of Sandbox. At the same time Alsharani began working on the video feedback art found on the record’s cover art and that makes up the promo videos for its songs. That video feedback art, with its often intense, smearing colors and slowly shifting glitched landscapes can convey (for the right viewer) intense nostalgia for magnetic tape and all its foibles and (sometimes aesthetically productive) failures, but it’s also just immediately, viscerally effective, somehow warm and peaceful despite the ostensibly chaotic and broken nature of the source material. There are some similarities with Sandbox’s music, whether it’s the slowly retreating Stars of the Lid-ish washes of “Remember” or the warm hiss overlaying the bright tones of “Nattåg” or the way Alsharani layers the twinkling pulses of “Peyo” with other elements tweaked to snap gently into little percussive, bell-like hits each time they end. With ten tracks over 36 minutes, Sandbox is mostly devoted to presenting relatively brief glimpses into these little atmospheres, but on the 8:39 of “Sighs of a Sea Turtle” Alsharani shows that he’s capable of taking a more patient, ruminative approach as well. Underlaid with chirps and squeaks that certainly sound like they could come from the titular reptile, the burnished drift and sigh of the track is just as captivating and transporting as (to pick another should be peer) similarly extended pieces by Benoît Pioulard. One of the difficulties artists like Obay Alsharani can have with listeners not already familiar with the genre is that the surface impressions of lots of equally valuable work can be very similar. But this is music that calls for listeners to steep themselves in it as much as anything else, and by even the first time Sandbox ends with the precisely paced “Sleep”, those more familar will be able to tell that he has made a distinct and often beautiful addition to that body of work.





Track Listing:
1.Cocoon 01:45
2.Peyo 02:44
3.Northern Lights 03:13
4.Nattåg 03:37
5.Sighs of a Sea Turtle 08:39
6.Love, Fading 02:53
7.Remember 03:41
8.Release 03:42
9.Speak Your Truth 03:54
10.Sleep 02:23


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, electronic
Country: Sweden
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits