Over the last couple of months I’ve been rethinking my relationship with social media across various platforms. Mostly this has resulted in me stepping back further, especially insofar as posting goes, but largely involves a more conscious effort to avoid doomscrolling and other mentally degenerate, dopaminergic compulsions.

There’s a few reasons for this, some of them personal, some of it to offset some personal feeling of loss inside the system, some of it mental health protectionism. All of it, one way or the other, a deliberate avulsion against the insidious digitalisation and algorithmic funnelling of our lives at large.

I feel strongly that Ambient has represented a stalwart of resistance against the pace and insistence of modernity where few others have, always taking the slower and more measured route even whilst using the new tools and techniques of the age. Though, like my social media retreat, it’s sometimes difficult to toe this line without coming across as a Luddite, or pointedly politicising the position of slowness and withdrawal from the general frenzy of life.  In the last few years though a swath of Millennial and early Gen Z musicians have been navigating a post-ironic, post-postmodern space, lensing institutional electronic sounds and “dated” genre stylings with modern hyperpop and flocculating minimalist sounds that seem to put to sound this exact modern conundrum.

Malibu has been exploring a sort of nouveau-ambient/ambient trance/pseudo-new age varietal sound in this context for the past six years to great effect on two haunting EPs, but Vanities marks her first foray into a full length record. Though it’s not until the latter part of the record that the longer pieces come to haunt in the same manner as its predecessors, much groundwork is laid in the comparatively short tracks of the first half or two-thirds.

Bitesized little nuggets like “L’Empire Du Vide”, “The World Beyond Lashes” and “The Hills (Interlude)” seem to emerge from nothingness, pulsing vocal coos and hums carried by tidal synthetics and more organic pan pipes out of the echoic darkness. Brief they are, flaring into life the way a phone so illuminates the bedroom with nocturnal notifications. Abrupt they are too, disappearing even more quickly than they bloom as the digital world rushes away again to be replaced by the dead space of the moments between bytes.

The longer early moments in “So Sweet and Willing” and “Lactonic Crush” allow for more probing explorations in broader sweeps of melancholic synth chords and atmospheric sounds: police sirens wail distantly, thunder crashes, the whispered poetry of the lovelorn seeming to bridge the gulf so humanly between the artificial and the natural. They pave the way for the fuller realisations of “Contact” in all its weightless intimacies, and centerpiece titular “Vanities” as it fills on woven textures piled up and fleshed out from its brethren into a 3D hologram of sustained strings and lonely piano and breathy airs that sit, rather than hang, in the isolating blackness around.

Vanities is crisp, minimal, and haunted. Haunted by the feeling of emptiness and loneliness that the digital world invites through individualism. Haunted by the echo of dopamine hanging over every piece of media, every post, every engagement. Haunted by the sense that the real world is moving onwards outside of all this without us, losing us, lost to us. I suppose the question at hand in Malibu’s dysthymia is: Are we to continue in the delusion of our internet “achievements” for this price.