An artist’s life can be an itinerant one. If one is lucky, one can be carried along from artists’ colony to fellowship to university residency. More often, an artist sets off in pursuit of a new, inspiring locale, or a more sympathetic community. And sometimes an artist is in flight from a lethally oppressive government. Musician and sound artist Bana Haffar, who in bios and interviews speaks of herself as an expatriate from Saudi Arabia, describes the music on her latest album, intimaà, available on Touch, as coming “from a deep place of unbelonging,” yet there’s nothing plaintive or sentimental or traumatized in her material. Each track is considered and careful while retaining an open-ended feeling of exploration and the freshness of discovery.

The album kicks off with the brief, sheer blast of “Clearing,” a towering, vibrating tone-wall that seeks and spreads and radiates while also conveying, in its forceful warbling and juddering, a sense of unease. Even the title is ambiguous. Is it a noun or a verb? Does it refer to an open space, or the act of opening a space? Before arriving at something like a resolution, the track collapses in a quick fade. Spare, crystalline percussion and the smart, insistent rhythms of the follow-up “Elemental” filter in to fill the vacuum. Echo effects are soon layered on, deeper, bass-heavy beats fall into place, and the piece jerks and quickens and accelerates forward. A sudden distorted, faltering piano sample, like an insistent Beckett-esque monologue composed of four or five words that repeat and splinter and confuse, insinuates itself into the rhythm, and the song slows long enough to incorporate the new material before resuming its headlong pace – only to spin out once more and wind down in a dizzying haze of fragmented piano chords. Haffar sacrifices the latent melody of the piano for the sake of rhythm but creates a new melody in the process, fortifying the idea that the process is often the work itself. There is no distinction.

“Lifter,” with its disembodied, wordless voices and resonant emptiness, could almost qualify as dub while it continues some of the album’s larger themes of discontinuity and dislocation. Snapping, short-circuited wiring, crispy snares, and muffled buzzes provide palpable texture in the conjuring of a landscape that feels both alien and welcoming without being contradictory.

From here, intimaà switches direction, this time away from modes of dichotomy and disconnection toward something more suite-like and holistic, possibly transcendent.

“Save This Manual for the Future,” the first of three tracks that seamlessly segue into each other, is all long, languid, melancholic tones that unfurl in single sonic streamers or cluster and glow and decay in plush chords. It’s the longest track on the album and it is unapologetically beautiful without feeling indulgent. And while the future in its title is perhaps a hauntological one, and traces of the Boards of Canada are marbled through the music, Haffar brings a gravitas and intensity to her track that dispels further associations.

“Sit Still” is where Haffar’s voice becomes a musical element, singing lyrics I honestly can’t make out, other than the “sit still” of its title. In repeating the phrase, it’s as if Haffar is gently scolding herself for her restlessness and bargaining with herself to just relax for a moment. For someone searching for a sense of belonging, sometimes one has to stay in one place and let themselves be absorbed. This is where belonging can begin. Yet “belonging” can occasionally yield its own dilemmas – forced conformity, insularity, alienation. The music for most of the track is gauzy, light-struck, ascendant, but as the song moves toward its end, a deep, subterranean rumble kicks in and the heavenly pads that have been sustaining the hovering atmosphere plunge into prickly distortion. The track fades in a flickering fluorescent glare, sounding both anxious and hopeful.

That flickering pulse carries over to the final track, “All That Is Sometimes Not Considered,” which consists of an extended chord that swells and recedes, that achieves clarity then collapses back to heaving distortion, that expands and contracts while continually occupying the same amount of space. It’s a gush of unchecked emotion, both ascendant and mournful, and its insistent stuckness seems a gesture of unnamed hope and a reckoning with limitations.

For all its brevity – it’s a mere 35 minutes in length – intimaà feels epic. Haffar achieves this by packing every track with rich, engaging, exciting ideas that merit and reward repeated listens. I urge you to sit still and give it your attention.