Spectreview: Babe, Terror – Horizogon

Released: September 15, 2020

Experimental
Ambient
Free Jazz

-AQUA-

For a guide to the review color rating system, click here.

São Paulo artist Claudio Szynkier (aka Babe, Terror), stricken from an autoimmune disorder, was already familiar with the isolating effect of lockdown when he recorded Horizogon in 2019. How could he have predicted what the entire world would encounter just a year later?

Though unintentional, the COVID pandemic shadows the records’ ambient, nostalgic dread; like an airborne virus it floats formlessly, senselessly across the ears. Triple and quadruple harmonies of dead voices surface like ancestral memories. Free jazz instrumentation rise and fall like the serrated curves of plywood waves: the breathy rasp of a saxophone clashing with pattered piano and the chug of an automated keyboard, a close-miced acoustic bass surfacing in waves of panic. Each track is built from these parts, but though they are largely indistinguishable as pieces to a whole, key moments arise. “Horizongon Squadra” and “Salina Lúmen” in their mini-symphony structures and graceful piano parts, might be the most unapologetically beautiful songs here.

As a whole however, it’s one large strikingly-original dreadnought. Its noxious swirl is a headspace so many of us have existed in for so long; a ceaseless, bustling convection oven that’s only comforting for how anxiety-inducing it is. Each instrument becomes a character, another person moving in parallel but not in harmony, like people in a crowded carnival. The despair and hope it provokes are intensely specific to this moment in time, and that makes Horizogon necessary listening.

Recommended for the valley of the damned.