Malibu: Vanities

An album review of a brilliant ambient record by French ambient producer/composer Barbara Braccini, aka Malibu

Malibu

Vanities

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After a mix or two, and all sorts of collaborations, as well as EPs and standalone singles this is Malibu’s debut full-lengther, arriving late last year. Malibu is one of the names Barbara Braccini uses to record and release music. She’s a Stockholm-based, French DJ and producer, vocalist, and composer.

It makes sense that she’s made the music for a short film, and done voiceover work, for much of Vanities feels like it could work as score, and though the vocals are essentially wordless (with some field recordings and some spoken-word fragments) there’s the decision behind placement in the text, and placement diction-wise that let you know this has all been thought about a lot.

I could imagine this record as the alternative score for David Cronenberg’s Maps To The Stars film, or even his son’s movie, Possessor.

Vanities also reminds me of Lustmord’s Word As Power — a record I adore.

Where that album feels like Philip Glass with dark-metal and ambient vocals attached, Vanities is like dark, stretched Enya. It also feels adjacent to the work of Burial. They’re both walking down side-streets late at night, but where Burial has built a broken-beat path from the shards of techno and drum n bass, Malibu’s lone walk in the rain feels like a field trip for field recordings, with the pastoral ambient records of Eno and Juliana Barwick for emotional support as much as actual soundtrack.

Sometimes Malibu can say a lot in just two minute (Nu) and all without literally saying anything, an ethereal synth swab kicks us off with slow circles. Other times it’s a slow crawl through the mood of a piece, to build and build, not so much tension, but certainly a delay from actual release (the title track, and Jaded).

Deeply cinematic at times (Contact), and also light enough to include a wafty single —

— this is my new favourite comfort-album for drifting off, for walking the dogs, for starting the day, or ending the night. For a variety of settings. But always, I’m committed to the full album; it feels like its own movie or novella in that sense. A completed piece that you must take in as a whole. The book you finish in one sitting, the film you rewatch on your own for the instant nostalgia almost immediately.

What Is It That Breaks feels almost like Bowie and Eno’s late 70s collaborations, Watching People Die feels like Lustmord and Burial remixing one of Enya’s stems over a Trent Reznor piano piece.

All of it feels like both the absolute presence and a near complete absence at the same time; good and old fashioned ambient music that pierces the silence…with its own form…of silence.