Some albums play like records. "Là" plays like a landscape. One minute you’re tracing rusted wires in a room full of stuttering film projectors; the next you’re following a Bedouin man’s rebab through scorched air while the desert itself seems to breathe. This release, an outgrowth of the eponymous exhibition at S.M.A.K in Gent, is not just a collection of sounds - it is an urgent terrain. One with wind, resistance, and the twitch of latent sorrow baked into every minute.

A collaboration between Belgian-based artists Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat - known for their meditative, politically engaged media works - and the electroacoustic conjurer Laszlo Umbreit, "Là" is part sonic essay, part dislocated ritual. Add in writer Rose Higham-Stainton’s haunting companion text "Strategies for Survival", and you’ve got something closer to a multidimensional grief engine. There’s even a touch of absurd poetry: a camel’s rib cage, a tourist’s gaze, a vibrating bush - objects animated by survival, or at least by the same breeze that once shook Chantal Akerman’s blinds.

This is a work about Palestine, and around Palestine, but never simply set there. It resists the documentary impulse. Instead, it burrows into sonic symbols: a repeated A-note (La) played by eleven 16mm projectors ("Ensemble"), leaf-static and temple blocks ("For Her"), breathy flutes and metallic ghost trails ("No", "There"). It is a protest in slow-motion, delivered in the language of textures. Political, but obliquely so - like the sound of silence being violently reclaimed.

Let’s talk about that first piece: "Ensemble". A small army of looped projectors creating a single pitch in La. You could call it musical minimalism. Or you could call it archival necromancy. These machines weren’t built to sing, but here they are, made to hum in harmony - a mechanical solidarity that may outlast even the humans who built them. Each click and motor whir hints at another life, another reel, another refusal to be quiet.

Then comes "No". And here, titles matter. In Arabic, “la” means no - a gesture of refusal, resistance. In Hebrew, it becomes “for her”, a dedication. In French, “there” - pointing to a place never quite reachable. The album’s very name is a multilingual palindrome of pain and ambiguity. It echoes Akerman’s "Là-bas", but unlike Akerman, this work dares to draw closer to the land’s surface, even if it trembles. Even if it risks seeing too much.

"For Her" is perhaps the most tender track: leaves rustle, electronics glisten like mirages, and cymbals open like petals or shrapnel. One feels watched by the desert itself, as if each sound were being judged by an ancient landscape that’s heard it all before. It’s not pretty, but it’s deeply alive.

"There" closes the double ten-inch like a coda to a dream you didn’t know you had. A wooden block, a monomachine, and delay trails thick as heatwaves. One might say it ends in abstraction, but that’s not quite true - it ends in vapor, in a trace, in the fraying hem of a presence too complex to summarize.

Technically, "Là" is masterfully executed. The sound design, especially the layering and restraint, feels surgically precise but spiritually loose. Umbreit’s role as producer and mixer holds this strange, wavering material together like a tent in a storm. But it's not about virtuosity - this album listens to itself just as much as it asks us to.

And yet, there’s humor too. Not a laugh-out-loud kind, but the sly irony of using dying machines to testify to a people who refuse to disappear. Or calling a track "No" and filling it with the breath of a flute - an exhale that sounds suspiciously like "yes". The album doesn’t moralize. It murmurs, whistles, creaks, and vibrates, like a protest sign made of reeds and desert dust.

In the end, "Là" is not music to be consumed. It’s a site. A displacement. A haunted architecture of listening. Sit with it long enough and you’ll start hearing its echoes in the radiator, the traffic outside, your own breath.

Just don’t expect closure. The desert, after all, is famously unfinished.