Malibu
Some music may be best for a moody gray day, or hits when the sun sets after an oppressively sweaty Saturday. But it’s the sign of a great musician to be able to produce those moods without straying too far from their sound. Malibu has the genius to turn a melody into a story and a feeling into a sound. The French musician Barbara Braccini, whose ambient moniker Malibu sounds more like a relaxing trip, takes her audience through the movements in her tracks that she brilliantly stitches together. Her webs within each track are a sonic collage that explores her own experiences while providing listeners a path to explore their own interiority. Expect a perception-shattering performance when she comes to Sleeping Village to perform on March 11 with ESP.
There’s a maximalism to Malibu’s music for how quiet some songs are, with layers of strings, field recordings and deep synths. If you are listening in a crowded space, it’s almost impossible to separate music from the diegetic noise of your surroundings. It barely gets easier in a quiet space, with the softest external sounds bleeding in believably. Perhaps this is the point; a Fluxus legacy that turns any environment from randomized chaos into intentionally cohesion. Malibu makes music for infinity, where every heartbeat belongs. In her six-minute-plus tracks, notes echo out across an undulating soft sonic field that could be the artifact of any number of elements that hover together. Her music holds on for minutes that do not grow old and remarkably has direction that makes her tracks evolve instead of feeling repetitive.
On her newest album, the titular track “Vanities” moves along heart-wrenching chords that dissolve almost into dissonance before catching her breath, exhaling next to other wind instruments that tickle the surface of the sound and break through the hauntingly beautiful sonic sea. Strings provide a backbone to her meditations, and the song seems to call through the ambient filter, my ear grasping the restrained symphony that drips with catchy leads that fade before my mind stops singing them back to her. Songs like “So Sweet and Willing” bring Malibu in a more pop direction with a cinematic edge, as her cries play without noticeable words next to notes that hold significantly more weight. It’s almost like listening to the dream of a song, a memory almost forgotten. Sometimes instruments appear only for a minute in mere portions, while the shorter songs are over seemingly just as they began.
Malibu is a seasoned sonic architect at this point, able to remix and transform memorable samples into new meditative earworms. She is joined by ESP, another ethereal act comprised of Donovan William Lally and Zephyr Maliki. ESP’s discography is certainly more upbeat and hits home just as beautifully. Their bleeps and beats are reminiscent of trance and vapour wave that sound as if hyperpop spent some time self-reflecting. Both Malibu and ESP have releases with Year0001, a label with an incredible roster that promises to be the second coming of PC music. Their concert in Chicago, programmed by Metro Presents, is sure to be a sound bath of delectable swirls where, in the music, you can find yourself.
Malibu and ESP play Sleeping Village, 3734 West Belmont, on Wednesday, March 11. Doors at 8pm; show at 9pm. Tickets are $20 plus fees, available at sleeping-village.com.
