Snakeskin by Julia Sabra and Fadi Tabbal

Beacon Sound and Ruptured announce the second installment in their Corrosion Series and their sixth collaboration overall: Snakeskin, a moody, evocative, and achingly beautiful album by Lebanese producer/musician/engineer Fadi Tabbal and singer-songwriter Julia Sabra from Beirut-based indie trio Postcards.

Shapeshifting above ambient and industrial undercurrents, Snakeskin utilizes tape loops, synthesizers, vocals, and drum machines, combining Julia’s pop-inspired melodies and choral roots (an echo from her religious upbringing) with Fadi’s affinity for minimalism and musique concrète. The album seamlessly incorporates the melancholy electro-pop of 'All The Birds', the quiet menace of 'In Our Garden' (long-lost treasures, ancient lies / another buried paradise), and the beat-driven 'Signs'. The title track sums up their frame of mind, beginning as a lullaby and evolving into a glittering tapestry of distortion and feedback.

The duo began working on Snakeskin in the aftermath of the August 2020 Beirut port explosion, which killed over 200 people, injured 7,000, and left around 300,000 people homeless. Indeed, Julia's home was destroyed by the explosion and her partner and bandmate Pascal badly injured. The first song that they wrote together in the following months was 'Roots', which closes out the album and was composed for the Ruptured-curated series The Drone Sessions in the fall of 2020.

As the artists write, Snakeskin is a product of "the disappearance of life as we know it, and with it the decay of nature and living creatures. There is no rebirth, no renewal. It’s about what it means to feel at home in such a place."

Some tracks were also inspired by events happening in the surrounding region, such as the invasion of Armenia by Azerbaijan and the Palestinian uprising of May 2021 (Sheikh Jarrah) - both events shedding light on relationships to home and land across the wider region.

"The moon speaks in tongues we can't discern / A plastic dove hangs from a cypress branch / Haven't you heard? / Nothing grows here anymore / The air is burnt / Nothing grows..."

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"A dream pop colossus...the combination of Sabra’s pop-orientated vocal melodies cutting through Tabbal’s minimal yet brutalist musical architecture is both life-affirming and melancholy" - Norman Records

"Night glows while the streets vent an ambiance of decay. Concrete is a noose, a conductor of life’s disappearance. The end was written so long ago that, at this point, it feels like adaptation and survival are all that’s left. Snakeskin explores and expands on these buried emotions, casting imaginative, crumbling arrangements into the dead soil where purpose doesn’t grow but hangs on. Sabra and Tabbal shape melancholic synth patterns, feedback squalls, liminal vocals, and so much more into knife-edged pathways through the growing chaos. Written during the aftermath of the 2020 Beirut port explosion (that destroyed Julia’s home and injured her partner), Snakeskin is a beacon." – Foxy Digitalis

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