Claudio Szynkier aka Babe, Terror is a Brazilian artist whose medium is mood and memory. While technically an electronic musician and composer, one is unlikely to be as impressed with the actual mechanics of his work as the received impact of it. Its haunted empirical phenomenology. The sounds that Szynkier selects and how they are arranged act together as a kind of catalysis, a spark to light the hearth in one's soul. He does not compose songs as much as he does movements.
Szynkier's latest effort is Horizogon, and an album that he wrote during the early days of the pandemic shut down in São Paulo. Walking empty streets day after day. Feeling the world turn, while lives are abandoned or indefinitely put on hold. The metabolic processes of the human world placed in status in an attempt to preserve life and avoided the indifferent touch of disease. Wading through troths voiceless anxiety, allowing the quivering oils of this quiet desolation seep into the pores and stain the bones with a ripple of dull panic. In many ways Horizogon a funeral hymn for the world that has passed, and in others a lament of the way it has been sustained a new twisted form. A mode of living that refuses to acknowledge the fact that the earth has shifted beneath one's feet. A suicidal resolve, stumbling into the rush of the moment like a man who has fallen into a raging river, and instead of swimming for shore, attempts to plant his feet on the river bed and continue his Sunday stroll despite the material impediments presented by a river that has swept him clean out of his own shoes. Drowning is a small price to pay for pride. Horizogon is the funeral hymn for this man and the world he is a symbolic embodiment of. As the German proverb says, "No work stops for the dying." And this is doubly true of the soon to expire.
You're likely to find that Horizogon doesn't sound like Szynkier's other work as Babe, Terror. His previous album 2018's Fadechase Marathon was more techno-oriented as a kind of ghost of a night club, flickering in the back of your mind like a gas lamp struggling to stay lit. Szynkier's current album by contracts is like a long church choir. Instead of beats, you have layered, reverent piano and clarinet passages that curl through the loops of oaky bass chords and crackling 8-bit chatter to get lost in the sanctifying mists of dissolving, spirit soluble supplications. The somber and unnerving calm of the shifting vocal samples and their ambiguous tonality that flourishes through them is the centerpiece of the album and the aspect that defines the most distinctive qualities of its character. Mourning but hopeful. For even if this life we live were to die, this road we have traveled suddenly blocked by stones, some life will persist. There is always another path. If the world we knew is truly in its' twilight, the best we can do maybe to kiss it's fevered brow good night.
You will be able to pick up a copy of Horizogon on Vinyl from Glue Moon sometime in December. In the meantime you can buy a digital copy here.
