To be released on LP and digitally on 07/16/21. Clear vinyl limited to 100. Artwork by Heather Gabel. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To view the store page, click here.

Natalie Chami and Whitney Johnson perform as a duo under the name Damiana. Both artists have built their own catalogs as multi-instrumentalist improvisers and composers in the Chicago experimental music scene, exploring the intersections between ambient, electro-acoustic improv, and more legible songcraft based around their voices and their work with synths and electronics — all filtered through their backgrounds in classical performance and education. Chami’s solo recordings under the TALsounds moniker have appeared on labels such as NNA Tapes, Ba Da Bing!, and Moog’s own imprint, and her collaborative projects include the trio Good Willsmith with Hausu Mountain co-founders Max Allison and Doug Kaplan. Johnson has released a series of solo LPs as Matchess on the label Trouble in Mind, and performs with Laura Callier (Gel Set) as the duo Simulation — along with contributions to recordings and live performances by Ryley Walker, Circuit Des Yeux, Bitchin Bajas, and Tortoise’s 20th anniversary performances of TNT, among other artists. After meeting in the early 2010s, Chami and Johnson embarked on multiple US tours together, and their informal duo collaborations naturally crystallized over time into the Damiana project.

The duo’s debut album Vines presents their first recordings after years of live sets and home recording sessions. The album strikes a balance between the realms of deliberate compositional sculpting and free-form improvisation, as Damiana’s evolving sessions of looping synth phrases and harmonized vocal lines emphasize austere beauty and meditation as much as spectral disorientation and instrumental complexity. While the tracks on Vines create the illusion at any given moment of a standing cloud, often colored by Johnson’s lush viola and Chami’s effect-manipulated electronics, a zoomed out perspective of each session reveals an undulating story arc with contrasting emotional resonances and constantly shifting timbral focus. Treading the line between transportive stasis and upward motion, the duo has honed their sense of when to push forward with a new texture or melodic flourish without disrupting the atmospheres that they meticulously build together.

Chami and Johnson’s partnership in Damiana makes the most out of their striking similarities in performance style and technique. Both musicians perform with an arsenal of hardware synths, keyboards, loopers, and effects pedals, and have come to be so comfortable with their chosen instruments that they can easily generate spontaneous compositions complete with gorgeous vocal lines and complicated instrumental backdrops at a moment’s notice. In a vast sea of improvised, one-take electro-acoustic music, Chami and Johnson stand out as bastions of technical prowess and nuanced emotional storytelling. Both look at solo performance with the full frequency range in mind, switching between everything from swooning melodies in the highest vocal octave, to short percussion patterns that clatter along as gentle rhythmic frameworks, to amorphous electronic noise, to bursts of low-end that steer their sessions into new harmonic configurations. All these strategies permeate the music of Damiana, effectively doubling the palette of sounds at their disposal. The resulting sessions can sound at times like one mind with two voices and four hands, with complementary vocal melodies and synth phrases pouring out in unison. In other moments, Chami might leap into a cascading synth solo that evokes Terry Riley, or Johnson might start looping majestic layers of her viola into the mix, while their partner works to flesh out the swirling landscape of textures and harmonies behind them.

Chami and Johnson approach the music of Damiana as a distinctly femme endeavor. In talking about the project, Johnson argues that a soft-femme aesthetic is often stigmatized or ignored in the noise/experimental world compared to the dominant hard-masc voices, or lumped into its own category closer to popular vocal music despite its adventurous, complex, and troubling elements. Chami identifies a back and forth shift in the duo’s music between the forces of support / nurturing vs. disintegration / depletion — a dichotomy that mirrors the reality of the lived femme experience. Damiana presents a view of femininity that’s just as much grounded in its beautiful and delicate aspects as its challenging or even frightening turns. Chami and Johnson sonify beyond binary expectations of gender, and seek to transcend other imaginary limitations on what the world can become.