Azu Tiwaline, "The Fifth Dream"

Dub-inflected atmospheres that settle like dusk across a desert mirage

When night falls in the desert, does it make a sound? If it does, Azu Tiwaline could likely score it. The Tunisian/Cambodian producer, whose real name is Donia (surname not shared), grew up in Côte d'Ivoire before moving to France in her teens, where she was advantageously positioned at a right angle to both the UK bass and German techno scenes. This was in the 90s, a time when both places were arguably at their culture-shifting peak, and their influences show up in the rave tracks Donia made as “Loan” through the early 2000s. In 2017, she moved to el-Djerid in southern Tunisia, where she adopted the “Azu Tiwaline” alias (a Berber term meaning “eyes of the wind”) to coincide with a sparser, more meditative style of techno inspired by her new Saharan surroundings. Her first full-length under this name, the beautifully-named Draw Me A Silence, arrived in 2021 to deserved positive attention. Her less-covered sophomore album, The Fifth Dream, came out early this year, charting a course deeper into the evocative world-building she had mapped out on her first release.

By “world-building,” I mean that The Fifth Dream is an album that renders itself in three dimensions. Every percussive tap or synthetic rumble sounds like it’s positioned at a different end of an empty room, as though the distance between notes can be measured in physical meters rather than metrical ones. This crystalizes into a shadowy spaciousness, a sense of width and depth across which Donia’s instruments often literally reverberate. A backing orchestra of found sounds -  birdsong, insect calls - implies that this landscape is a real place, perhaps the dawn-lit oasis that Donia suggests with her cover art. But the contours of her rhythms direct towards inner worlds as well. Bass is styled to sound suspiciously like heartbeats, draped in jittery wooden drums that echo like they’re all around you and maybe inside of you too. In this introspective setting, even Donia’s more rave-forward cuts become invitingly somnambulant, dance beats redesigned to lead deeper into a dream.

Bonus Pick: For a trippier take on ambient dreamscapes, head over to Pakistan for NAWKSH’s hallucinatory, Animal Collective-ish LP Mythic Tales of Tomorrow II.