Alia

Alia works from an unusual set of inheritances. Through her father, the Lebanese percussionist Jamal Mohamed, she grew up around Levantine jazz and a wide range of other musics; she studied raqs sharqi, the dance better known in the West as belly dance, alongside Arabic music, and learned the kacapi from the Indonesian pandit Ade Suparman. She took up the theremin after seeing the Iranian-Armenian musician Armen Ra perform in Los Angeles, drawn to an instrument she describes as "like a human voice, but strange and magical". An in-demand session player, she is also part of Melanie Martinez's touring band, and the album follows a 2025 cover of Harold Budd recorded with Nailah Hunter.

Where the Echoes Bloom was produced alone, at home, with ALIA performing theremin, kacapi and synthesis herself: lush pads from her Arturia and Korg synthesizers, heavy with reverb, set against field recordings collected from many places, frogs and birds from the rice fields of Bali, water dripping in her own bath. Her father contributed percussion remotely, bells, brushes, woodblocks, cajon and Moroccan bongos, some of it processed so heavily that the source is no longer recognisable. The aim, she says, was a tangible, almost wet sense of place, somewhere warm and welcoming but faintly strange.

The two instruments at the centre, the gliding theremin and the intimate, melancholic kacapi, carry the melodies, and the result sits close to exotica without quite belonging to it. The opening single Endless Love begins with breathy, close voice before opening into longing, zither-led figures; Crescent Sun is darker, built on shadowy programmed bass and arpeggiated zither in keeping with the silk-road image of its title.

ALIA has described the album as shaped by grief during the war in Gaza, and several pieces carry dedications: the opening Soul of My Soul is named in tribute to Khaled Nabhan and his granddaughter Reem. It arrives on Leaving Records, the Los Angeles home of leftfield ambient and new age.