KHAZNA means safe, vault or treasury in Arabic. It's the emotion locked away in kiss facility’s heart.
KHAZNA feels like music made for cinema. Its sunsets drift longer and ache deep blues, lavenders and yellows. Its rain falls in slow motion, each droplet reflecting a light like the stars in the sky. Its desert winds pick up dust, shrouding you in a timid, sandy haze.
KHAZNA is gilded in forlorn lyrics skirted with golden electric guitars.
KHAZNA is kiss facility’s debut album.
‘Lynch’ wakes the album and blows in the windows of your chambers with glitchy synthed vocal chops that are held in the ballast of a guitar. The natural light panes through. The dust unlocks the structures of light beams like Mayah Alketeri’s classic layered wispy and almost choral like arabic vocals over Slavador Navarette’s production.
As you reach for your window to close it, the light crawls away from you and peers to the gold, floral, gilded white ceiling. ‘Ishara’ echoes the same way the gold glints in your eyes. Mayah floats over a coalescence of strings. You turn your head out into the white dunes, your eyes adjust to the flare as Aleyna Tilki finishes her verse. The distance is vast and the close of electric guitars crescendo into the silky ‘Plasma’.
At KHAZNA’s epicentre ‘Absent from my eyes’ and ‘Noon’ breach a ghost-like dub world that feels like abandoned mega machinery. Their shimmery presence bolstered by Mayah, feels crystalline yet industrially sinewed in its chopped and down pitched fibres. ‘Kotshena’ is a bouncy expulsion and eruption of Mayah’s spirit. She grasps at simplicity in “Kotshena” (playing cards in Egyptian Arabic), and braids her hair whilst grappling with her tumultuous dignity.
kiss facility concludes the album in a shoegazey style with ‘Qamar 14’ where Mayah’s lyrics are throttled in a lunar beauty and torqued in “crescent(ed)” ache. ‘Flux’ unfolds last in a dreamy coastline of desire for her loved one in wake of her flaws. Her poetic dedications match the song's whimsy.
KHAZNA radiates spirals of torn thoughts and sonic anticipations in heartache.
KHAZNA is fbi.radio’s album of the week.
Words by badbitchbenny