Azu Tiwaline dreams in dubbed out drums and manipulated field recordings on a sick 2nd album via Marseille’s IOT Records

Since emerging in 2020 with an acclaimed debut for Livity Sound, Tiwaline has attracted keen attention to her style of reticulated rhythmic syncopation and lush yet arid atmospheres that articulate her heritage and spirit thru the vernacular of global dance music. ‘The Fifth Dream’ proceeds from a debut 2020 LP ‘Draw Me a Silence’ with eight new productions that impart her impressionistic perspective on waking dream life and altered states relating to club music. It’s a substantial, near hour long session that takes its time to snake from reverberant steppers reminding of 2562 and early Shackleton to ruggeder rides redolent of recent Peverelist, and shore up in the latest examples of her original synthesis meshed with field recordings made in the desert of her native El Djerid, in South Tunisia, with added tombak drums and modular synth played by Franco-Persian spar Cinna Peyghamy. In step with the LP format, rather than short form, Tiwaline paints the broader canvas with a richly impressionistic, instrumental narrative that weaves between its tentative opener, spaced out with distant pipes and close mic’d ASMR whispers, via loose echoes of ’06 dubstep in ‘Antennae Opening’, to fleet-hoofed trot in ‘Long Hypnosis’ reminding of Shackleton’s psychedelic progginess, and a crafty standout of liquid-limbed duppy dance in ‘Reptilian Waves’ where her sound design sensitivities best elide with Cinna’s sloshing tombak in hybrid Arabic-Persian dance mode, before coming for the club jugular with their slamming ‘Mei Long’.