“It’s like if Ata Kak and Saint Etienne went to an Egyptian Lover show and smoked a lot of weed with Minnie Mouse”
DUBAIS started as a Project at a residency in Antwerp in 2012 by conceptual artist, theorist and cultural activist Dr. Nadia Buyse. The aim of this project was to create a pop band using a bathroom for the recording studio, a Samsung galaxy cell phone from 2010 as the only instrument and the least googleable name she could think of. This work served as a meditation on “consumer technologies, displacement, Utopia(s), diaspora, and the post identity complex”; these ideologies not being present in only the production and lyrical content, but also in the presentation of the music itself.
The music is genre-less; residing somewhere between punk and pop and bedroom; but never pop punk or bedroom pop. The music is composed of found sounds, rare drums, Casio keyboard graveyards, field recordings of grocery stores, confrontational and emotional lyricism that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Nadia’s singing anchors the chaos into perfectly crafted ear worms.
Between the years of 2012-2018 DUBAIS performed and wrote a multitude of music; only releasing on Bandcamp or limited physical releases with small DIY labels. Alongside these, she released two video Eps, a speculative fiction ‘pop-opera’ about the Berlin Wall and other site specific performance work commissioned by festivals and institutions such as Les Urbaines, Portland Institute of Art, and HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, (d)OCUMENTA, and Sound Acts (Greek theatre festival).
Post Covid- Post PhD-2023: DUBAIS comes back out with a series of MXTPS, immediate lathe cuts, and hand made one off merch that is only available at live performances across art museums, socialist clubs and DIY punk spaces across Europe. Despite the years of break, the non-engagement with Spotify or other industry expectations, DUBAIS wins hearts and minds wherever you are lucky enough to see her.
