Ultradegenerate farsocialist hyperorquestracionist ecoabstractèur grottosearcher jew from the transtropical new world. Buy Horizogon: https://babeterror.bandcamp.com

And Birmania:

https://zpellhologos.bandcamp.com/



Help me keep thinking and making music and albums full time https://www.patreon.com/babeterror Read more about by clicking the Patreon link. Visit my Instagram also. And the Politics and Sociology part of the site, including some essays in portuguese.

 

enjoy the landscape and read below...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


I was born in São Paulo, right on the Bela Vista-Paraíso-Bixiga districts conjunction ("Beautiful Sight"-"Paradise"-"Blister", home of traditional Vai Vai Samba School). Grew up listening to the Beatles, Who, Elton John, Steely Dan, Clube da Esquina, Genesis. Then I knew Pat Metheny & Lyle Mays music, and then Grizzly Bear, Tv On The Radio, before them, The Zombies, Blonde Redhead, early 2000's. Started to compose in my on way on the 2008 EP and on Weekend of 2009, on both with the most beautiful melodic choruses that I could manage to carve, and then I'd cut and generate repetitions to aggravate the original melodic impact. Then I expanded my methods and began to handle more complex lines, which were born of discoveries and exepriences with the decomposition of the original forms (the song Transplanted People, from the album Preparing a Voice To Meet The People Coming, is a watershed).

 

 

 

I tried in those years to master what I had at hand, which was always a simple set starting with my own body. What I did with my voice in the first years, building, decomposing, etc, then I eventually started doing with bits of music from my own music collection. I also learned to play with the piano in a way that It could touch myself, which was the true goal and reason. And then learned to model and join fabrics from different origins and phonographic sources. I also always have wanted to create a soundtrack for myself, to feed and illuminate my own world of wanderings, paths and adventures through the places. I believe most of the music was born of that will. To make good records and get them into my life, just as I had the other albums and discographies. A song that sounded empty to me, unable to bring and transform with music the worlds I lived or could fondly imagine (a subterranean party, a parade of boats in a remote Antarctic environment, a true abstract and colorful joy), would have been discarded.


 

I did a lot of things, I was a guitarist before, in school times, and around 2008 I started making this music, the Babe, Terror music, which has been changing a lot but gradually over time, but has always had, perhaps, the same desire: to create extreme amusement with collages, with transplants, pieces of things created and touched by me or rediscovered in a certain way.

 

 

 

(... more below)

 

 

 

The album Knights (which would never exist without the faith and support from Erol Alkan and Phantasy) was my first foray into the world of the underground impressionistic parties, the secret and pictoric parties of the mind and the imagination. Also it was a portal in Perdizes-Pompéia (Partridges-Pompeii), the neighborhood that I live in São Paulo, that has been opened for a parade of these phantoms and riders who would cross the neighborhood at dawn. Then College Clash (released firstly with the efforts from my comrade Dayve Samek's label) was a basketball teams meeting at a night camp in the countryside of the state of São Paulo in the winter, which is a dry and non-snowy one.


Each song in College Clash is a music streamer, a pennon, for a team & college. It's a raw tape-album of orchestrated and buried voices, in a dimension that looks like somewhere deep underground, a sandy and muddy soil. It's an album that I found myself in trouble to get into some years ago as a listener, but today, after a long pause, I consider it to be one of my most essential works, with some of my best ideas (the mood in "Nairobi" and "Tokyo") and some my best compositions ("Damascus", "Perdizes"). It is a work of a kind of a mental spontaneity in sounds and climates, which tries to achieve a sense that is analogous to the earlier great experiments in rap, with an apparently loose composition, supposedly precarious in sound, but, at the core, something very much compounded.

 

 

 

 

 

Ancient M'ocean, again released together with Phantasy, and with fantastic contributions from Mario Cascardo (videos), Michael Crook (comic book) and Bela J (design), came in 2017, when I am writing this text. Others will come next. About Ancient M'ocean, I can say I spent 4 or 5 years composing and editing the songs on this album. Thinking better now, this, as well as the others that will come next and are shelved for the near future, in fact is a fruit of a normal routine, that was becoming normal everyday, although it always has its charm. Making music is part of something that in fact has ceased to have this intention of capturing a certain magic to spurt in some place, and started to be the essential exercise of my imagination, and the thing which I do with more ease. So the composition became this everyday work, this labour in the factory of magic, and the albums are coming from there. Perhaps there is a collision, a mixture between this desire to animate and enchant worlds and this routine that is simply go there and make the things. This album, Ancient M'ocean, created me some difficulties but with the long time elapsed I had the chance to put and take out songs, feel and reassess their weight, make and prepare their carpentry as big park carts that take us on a journey without a return through this world in the immense polar that unfolds in the Earth, the very human home, which has infinite secret lands unfolding through all sides.

 

Ancient was made to be like a kind of "Caverna do Dragão" cartoon, in which the goal was not to meet the Venger, but the characters of the film The Savage Innocents of Nicholas Ray practicing some sort of extraordinary thing that would frighten us. I did not produce the album thinking about it. But that's how it turned out to sound like maybe. I like to imagine myself in a canoe, going from one island to another, difficult waves, in Windsurf For Souls I. And I think Allureon is my best song so far, the kind of "suite" (as the Uncut guy perfectly said) - a suite that ends in Forever Home, I want to note- that I always wanted to compose and whose very intention is actually to take you to wherever you want to go.

 

Good versions of what I think about music and the album Ancient M'ocean itself can be found here and here

 

 

Still in the early 2017 I started working on the most difficult musical piece to me so far. The reimagination of Home is a Feeling, song by the legendary Oxford shoegaze act Ride. This experience ended up generating what I think is the piece that best epitomizes everything I've done until that point and will do yet in music, A Creamy Crambled Suite For a Ride. I've dived into the recombination of parts from the song, using the spectral magic provided by the band inside the studio, probing the takes. I reunited these parts with arrangements and voices of mine, creating a new composition. I've put this single piece, which I see pretty much like a Babe, Terror album, available here. But it's also on Ride's Japanese Weather Diaries CD as bonus track. And on Ride's 2018 remix album, Waking Up In Another Town. The song occupies all the B side of the double vinyl (4 sides) and there I share space with Mogwai, Oren Ambarchi and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma amongst others. 25 minutes of music on those 2 Ride records, something that is completely memorable for me and greatly honors me.

 



A little while before that, I've produced a rework for Beyond The Wizards Sleeve (Erol Alkan + Richard Norris), a 16 min piece released in a beautiful Phantasy 12" edition. The track is a B side for Daniel Avery's excellent A-side rework for Soft Bounce. It's called Third Mynd. By doing that, me and the British producer U (BTU = Babe, Terror + U, a true wizard, who made with me one of my personal fav. records, Withour Armour, in 2013) have invented some things that changed my perspective on composition and production. It is certainly influencing my today's work, and will continue influencing. Great episode for me, one of the biggest adventures I've ever had as a musician. Almost at that same time, I was working on another wonderful challenge, structuring the track for Ride.


All these tracks you can find to listen here.

You can buy that vinyl here

Buy the Ride reworks album here (there is also a nice review by Juno).

More about my reworks here.

 

 

In mid-2018 I was making final adjustments on my new album, Fadechase Marathon. What is Fadechase Marathon? This album is a deepening in fictions of underground parties, which are in fact the celebrations of the human interior, parties that occur in the gaps of the heart. Perhaps I'm presenting on that album my most solar and nostalgic version of the "Wrong Dance Music" launched in Knights (2012), and undoubtedly there are my joyfulest composing experiences with the pianos so far, using different takes and recording modes in each song of this genre. I sing, I play and I try to create a moldy, campestral, rural and nocturnal atmosphere, a far-away but warm residence for the listener. Fadechase Marathon is the avenue, the movement that leads to the portal of this house that shelters an attic that brings you to some snowy rural place in 1977, that's what I like to think of it. Some constructions of this album began to be erected in 2011. There was a long pause, I went back to the work in 2014, 15 and finished in 2016 and 2017, with a few more strokes. It took, as Ancient M'ocean did in some ways, its definitive shape with time. A detailed version of what you'll find in Fadechase Marathon is here.

Bandcamp picked Fadechase Marathon as one of the best 2018 albums in electronic music.

 

In 2019, I embarked on one of the greatest adventures of my life. I started an experiment with orchestra, piano, instruments that would normally be used in jazz, and I wandered through the most rotten, and most lively, bright parts of my city at dawn. I made Horizogon, my best record. It's being released in 2020, and happened that I kind of made an album for the 2020 pandemic in 2019, without knowing it. I made a record for wanderers, for a still and deserted São Paulo, trying to connect its invisible and sublime secret harmonies and landscapes. I kinda made the lo-fi symphony for a city breathing like a new world, and it felt like that in the pandemic beginnings. There's more to know, inlcuding an interview with more details. It's for sure my most ambitious and greatest effort ever. The Guardian elected Horizogon "Global Album Of The Month" in 2020's September. Other great reviews can be found on A Closer Listen, I Thought I Heard A Sound and Chain D.L.K (1, 2). The Guardian elected Horizogon "4th Global Album Of The Year" in 2020. Follow the press here.

 

Just after that, Pitchfork published a wonderful essay about Horizogon and other albums linked to the matter of the "climate collapse. "Follow the press here.

 

Horizogon is a multimedia project. There is also a film directed by me, called Os Pólos (The Poles), to be released in 2021. The film, made at the very start of the pandemic in São Paulo, gathers the 6 songs of the record in their cinematographic versions, and join them with more material. You can watch all the 6 videos from the album here & here

 

In 2021, working on my second feature film, A Princesa de Rangoon (The Princess of Rangoon), I ended up writing a new album. I decided to call it Birmania and for it I invented a new project: Zpell Hologos. Listen to Birmania here and buy it with a secret bonus track, which is one of my favs from the entire process. 

 

Some remarkable things that have happened so far:

 
-My first show, at the Worldtronics festival in Berlin in 2008, when I was invited by curator the great Arto Lindsay. The friday before the show I went to see Hertha Berlin VS Cologne at the Olimpic Stadium. Got lost in the neighborhood cemetery on the previous afternoon when I went to buy the ticket, thought it was a traditional park. Cologne delegation stayed in the same hotel I was, Abion, where i remember to have great breakfests with some nice pork and cheese variations. We used to have the dinner at the festival venue, in the House of the Cultures of the World, and the organization offered us some great meals but more vegetarian.

-The Guardian premiere of Weekend in 2009; my EP premiere on New Yorker in 2008, words by Sasha Frere-Jones.

-A few years later the first set of EPs released by Phantasy, including versions of my songs made by Four Tet, Memory Tapes and Appleblim amongst others.

 
-In 2011 I went to Brighton invited by The Great Escape festival and Uncut magazine to open a night for Gang Gang Dance. That day I improvised songs with a coral looper and I felt at home. It was like the Berlin show, but I was much more trained. I remember having some good moments and melodic inventions there that disappeared in the atmosphere and I would not be able to repeat. Next day I made the same game, same method, maybe with better in a more calm venue, The Hope. Remember the music floated really good, but couldn't remember what music was. Made in and for the moment.

 
-The Novas Frequencias festival show of 2013, playing with no body presence, hidden in a black + christmas lights ambience, opening for the Tim Hecker band. I played with many pieces of melodies that would later be used in the album Ancient Mocean. It was in Rio de Janeiro, where I spent the previous day eating shrimp on the beach and walking through Ipanema, the land of my idols Vinicius and Tom.

 

-In 2017, Ride made me very proud and honored to have one of my best works to date- the rework created and produced for a the Ride song ("Home is a Feeling"), my best invention so far I believe- released on the japanese edition of the Weather Diaries album. And also on Ride's 2018 remix album, Waking Up In Another Town, where the song occupies all the B side of the double vinyl (4 sides) and share inches with Mogwai and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma amongst others. The piece, which is pretty much a reimagination and a recomposition inspired by ALL Ride and other shoegaze bands discographies, is called A Creamy Crambled Suite For a Ride. Listen to the complete, 25 minutes long version here. Buy here: https://www.discogs.com/Ride-Weather-Diari…/release/1044715225 minutes of music on 2 Ride records, something that is completely memorable for me and honors me a lot.

-In 2016, the extremely difficult conception and production of the Beyond The Wizards Sleeve rework ("Third Mynd") with U in the BTU adventure.

-Bandcamp picked Fadechase Marathon as one of the best 2018 albums in electronic music.

-The Guardian elected Horizogon "Global Album Of The Month" in 2020's September.

-The Guardian elected Horizogon "4th Global Album Of The Year" in 2020.

-The Pitchfork Article on Horizogon and other "climate collapse" albums

***

Other interesting things about me can certainly be known here.

 

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