They Kept Our Photographs

PROMO UPDATE 4TH OCTOBER: Resident Advisor review, WWFM interview, NTS 1hr show, Radio X interview (Switz), Gonzo Circus review (NL) + plays for the singles on Bayern 2, Radio Helsinki, ByteFM, CIBL Montreal, Dublin City

They Kept Our Photographs covers a lot of ground. Lyrically, singer-songwriter Julia Sabra delivers her most vivid and visceral work yet. Musically, producer/multi-instrumentalist Fadi Tabbal adds excursions into hyperpop and electronica to the duo's industrial-drone-ambient palette. The pair's enduring friendship translates into a rare kind of synergy, recalling collaborations such as Virginia Astley and Ryuichi Sakamoto's, Broadcast's Trish Keenan and James Cargill's, or Angelo Baladamenti and Julee Cruise's work on Twin Peaks.

Beyond the sonic parallels, Snakeskin's world shares with Twin Peaks an unsettling eerie quality. Angelic celestial beauty enclosing darkness and rot. It's a world where "fairies shimmer" and "church bells make no sound"; "cats breed and die" and "fireworks fall to the sea". It's ethereal and otherworldly, yet deeply grounded in the reality of the duo's life in Beirut. A reality perhaps best illustrated by "Waiting", in which Sabra borrows Etel Adnan's text "To Be In A Time Of War". Tabbal's synths tick like clocks and ring like bells as Sabra monotones enumerations of mundane acts of life during wartime - the automatisms pile up, the words interlace, everything blurs.