Babe, Terror – Horizogon
4/5
"I thought of this as a soundtrack from an apocalyptic São Paulo,” says Claudio Szynkier, AKA electronic producer Babe, Terror, of his latest album Horizogon. Since his 2009 debut, Weekend, Szynkier has built a repertoire from the concrete clubbing capital of Brazil that combines the pulse of Boards of Canada’s warped sampling with the softer end of My Bloody Valentine’s distortion. This sound found its peak in the surrealist dancefloor imaginings of 2017’s Ancient M’ocean – a record released by Erol Alkan’s Phantasy Sound label and paired with a comic book inspired by the album’s cinematic scope.
With Horizogon, Szynkier perhaps finds the perfect accompaniment to his quietly dystopian worldview: the coronavirus pandemic. Although largely produced in 2019 before the lockdown was enforced, Szynkier was then undergoing his own isolation owing to a longstanding autoimmune problem that left him confined to his apartment. There he wove together the album’s six tracks, from the choral abstractions of opener Scalar Velodromeda to the anxiety-ridden ambience of Alcalis, the string-laden cacophonies of Estuário Transurânia and the acid catharsis of Horizogon Catalase.
Read the review in the Guardian.
[This piece was published on 28/08/20]