‘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.
Themes recur throughout: disembodied voices carrying wavering open vowel sounds, clattering, plaintive piano melodies, and the underlying disruption of harmonies through discordant drones. In this way, Horizogon’s overlapping sequencing of tracks plays with the usual linear progression of a record. Instead of defined beginnings and endings, Szynkier perfectly captures the warping of time caused by experiencing isolation through removing any points of reference we might have as listeners. We are, rather, forced to capitulate to his swirling vision: a hopefulness cut through with dread.
Szynkier has shot a feature-length film of São Paulo descending into lockdown to accompany the record and, taken as a whole, his vision encapsulates the meandering uncertainty of our present moment. Just like the brief flashes of sprightly melody, there are glimpses of optimism, but ultimately we must succumb to the constant churn of timelessness and to the disorienting erasure of place – to this future apocalypse.
• Horizogon is released 8 September.
Also out this month
Taking her cues from the digitally abstracted pop crafted by the likes of Holly Herndon, Colombian singer Lucrecia Dalt releases her new album No Era Sólida. Dalt’s songs, written through the alter ego of the character Lia, provide a strangely hypnotising glimpse into a world of refracted voices, playful melody and stirring, bass-heavy undertones. Vocal trio and pioneers of the South African maximalist dance music gqom, Phelimuncasi release their debut album, Phelimuncasi: 2013-2019, an engaging mix of clattering drum programming and rhythmic toyi-toyi singing. A cratedigger’s gem arrives in the first of a series of Wamono compilations of Japanese funk and rare groove produced between 1968 and 1980, selected by DJs Yoshizawa Dynamite and Chintam. Highlights come in Toshiko Yonekawa’s horn-laden funk on Sōran Bushi and Tadaaki Misago & Tokyo Cuban Boys’ dubby Jongara Reggae.
