Italian duo SabaSaba suggest this latest release is “an imaginary soundtrack for a dystopian city,” and the picture they paint is of a very lonely place indeed. While their 2018 album drew inspiration from the likes of J.G. Ballard and William Gibson, Unknown City looks to China Miéville’s novel The City And The City as its source material, a tale in which two cities exist side by side, their citizens trained from birth to filter out each others’ existence. In paying homage to the novel’s themes, SabaSaba simultaneously shine a blacklight on certain ugly symptoms of modern life: those traits that allow us to stare glassily through fellow commuters who are clearly in need, and help us disconnect from facts and truths in order to dehumanise mourning parents, drowned asylum seekers or the inhabitants of cities reduced to rubble.
The landscape we’re led through is stark and grainy. Industrial smog blots out strange, wireframe structures, roads taper endlessly off toward indeterminate horizons and, on the rare occasions they are sighted, fellow travellers are revealed as husk-like shapes that fail to acknowledge your existence. For all its apparent emptiness, though, Unknown City crackles with negative energy. Greyscale synths, samples, drum patterns and drones suggest the powerful thrum of hidden machinery, while nape-prickling strings and strange, dislocated voices periodically make their unnerving presence felt.
The music loops and crawls and folds in on itself, broadly recalling the likes of Coil, Nurse With Wound and Techno Animal as it artfully stutters and dissembles. Elsewhere, you might confront visions of Four Tet being absorbed into grey goo, or Boards of Canada robbed of their strange, wan joy and left with nothing but a sense of terrible desolation. ‘Beszel’ offers a series of eyesocket-bothering metallic scrapes and ‘Ul Qoma’ a smeared, horror movie creep-out, while ‘Night Plotters’ presents a slow plod through ankle-deep ash that manages, somehow, to be borderline groovy.
If Unknown City is vaguer and more finely traced than its predecessor, it is also more complete. It’s stark, isolating, and minimal, but envelopingly so: a record that speaks to the scope and scale of the structures – physical and ideological – that surround us. At the same time, it reminds us that, even in a city of teeming, clawing bodies, we are always, inevitably, alone.
