A Glimpse of the Post-World - An Interview With Babe, Terror

A Closer Listen

Photo by Lunara Nascimento. Courtesy the artist

Claudio Szynkier is an experimental multi-media artist from São Paulo, Brazil who records music under the names of Babe, Terror and Zpell Hologos. Through sound collage and an archivist’s mindset, he wills together an art of subterranean connections, random encounters in time and space, and beautifully haunted soundscapes. We had a chance to talk with him via email; apart from being edited and formatted for clarity, the interview was conducted through questions in English and answers in both English and Portuguese, Claudio’s first language. Since Spanish is my first language, I was able to cross-check every answer in Portuguese and English, re-translating various sections of the text with better accuracy in mind. You can find the result below.

David Murrieta Flores (ACL): Hello, Claudio. Please tell us a bit about your trajectory as a musician, for readers unfamiliar with your work. Please talk a bit about the moniker “Babe, Terror”, how you came to it, and what it means for you to make music under it.

Babe, Terror / Claudio Szynkier (BT): I think I liked the duality, the ambiguity of the name. A double ambiguity: Babe as something sweet and Terror as something heavier. And the duality of translation. There’s an interview in which Caetano Veloso – who is better with words than I am – explains the Babe, Terror thing better to Beck. I give the floor to Caetano then:

Image provided by the artist

I was about 13 years old when the ‘94 World Cup took place; it was on the day of the Mexico and Norway game I think, that I was on a Walkman listening to Beck, that classic record Mellow Gold. I got the tape as a birthday present. I was cycling so fast on Avenida da Praia de Santos that I turned over, and if it hadn’t been for the public holiday that closed the lane for cars, I would have died. But the important thing is that the Walkman smashed the tape and I was seriously injured, broken and bloodied.

[The Babe, Terror name] was [another of these] non-improvised improvisations, in which I came up with a latitude and longitude system with a family or set of ideas, and afterwards I put them together for the best effect in my own head. I’ve kept it just because I can’t disappoint guys like Caetano Veloso and Beck Hansen. I also record today under the name Zpell Hologos, which is a more sophisticated construction, made with a process that resembles the one I use for the name of Babe, Terror tracks. Zpell Hologos is bem tinhoso [see editor’s note 1], it doesn’t mean anything in the material world, but can suggest a world itself… also, it’s very close to the sound of the word speleologists in Portuguese. And I’m a speleologist, I think I do it with music.

I’m interested in astrology, I’m Taurus with an Aquarius ascendant, Leo Moon, with a poor Sun aspect, but very good Moon, Venus and Saturn aspects with everything else. My trajectory is that I have been a musician since I was a child. I was one of those typically shitty students that exist in very poor Catholic countries with a consumerist middle class, 60% of the population on the poverty line, and colonized by the United States. I knew all the bands in grunge, MTV, shoegaze, progressive. And I was a long-haired kid who only played the guitar and didn’t study for school. We embodied [a certain] commonplace movie from the United States that was kind of residually reproduced in places of chronic orphanhood like Brazil, founded upon murders perpetrated by sick, religious Europeans, then raised and sucked by capitalism. In the same way that the average North American white child learns in school that the United States of America has a right to the world, to be an empire, and that there is a divine mission since Independence, they learn there is an “exceptionality”. Not that successive looting, slavery and capitalist exploitation enable this nationalist “exceptionalism”, just like they learn that it is normal for the United States to have a bizarre army and a bizarre military industry, which legitimizes going around the world imposing “freedom” and “fighting tyrants”, “fanatics”, and “cartels”, against “evil”, or training a troupe of semi-literate locals to try to expel and imprison Lula, the greatest post-war world leader. In the same way that North American children learn this toxic culture of “exceptionality”, which will originate by diffuse lines in outbreaks of school shooters, the Brazilian middle-class white child learns at school more or less that he or she is American. There is a great, cool side to being an American in Brazil. You are the periphery and the backyard of a country whose culture broth produces David Simon, James Baldwin, Cormac McCarthy, Barbara Kingsolver, Chuck Berry, A Tribe Called Quest, Brian Wilson, and there is a genius dialectic there, in that capacity to produce violence, technology, capitalism and unparalleled beauty, all at the same time.

[In a deceivingly opposite sense, we could talk about] a nostalgic traditionalist anachronism that moves other countries today, its target and true desire to produce a kind of rebirth of a cultural sovereignty, and of a certain “state of exuberance” whose fuel is chaos. But it doesn’t look promising. It looks bad. Deep down, restorative nostalgia wants to replace itself, it wants to become the dialectical machine, the one that is at the heart of the United States, with all its dirt and magic. Something feels wrong by repeating the circuit of the Empire. This is one of the things that are in dispute in the world. And also, in another branch, how to regulate this machine of progress so it doesn’t destroy the world and humanity, and that’s why I define myself, with all the curves I’ve experienced, as a socialist and internationalist. What is in dispute, for me, what matters, is not how nostalgia will mutate and modulate into something “hidden, fertile and glorious”. What is in dispute for me is the return to the possibility of integrating decadence and beauty, not in the platonic sense, in the sense of intensifying possibilities and gifts of the unknown, as Sophie, Bi Gan, or Jia Zhang-Ke did. What is in dispute is how to give space to a de-virilization and decapitalization of the entire world, something that can germinate from waste (like my work suggests sometimes), and, in the process, seeing the contradictions that arise from this.

In the 90s and 2000s, we were high-school bootleg Americans here. We were and are formed to have a great portfolio of skills in the market and participate in the corporate business world. To have a car and a “position” — how ridiculous. We were, especially in the middle class and upper middle class, those who breathed the collegiate landscape of “popular students”, “weird [hippies]”, and “nerds”. We were a bootleg America of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton era, each a continuation of the other, and I can’t say it wasn’t cool in a way. Access to a mythology of gods from Sparta, Alexandria, Athens and Rome, the American Venuses and Molochs, a pantheon that has at the same time Faulkner, Roth, Borzage, John Huston, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, William Wyler, Brian de Palma, Larry Bird, Richard Page, Eric Tagg. To live with imagination on this Olympus! Then, of course, we discovered the Brazilian Olympus, discovered the work of Gilberto Gil at the turn of the 70s to the 80s, Terreno Baldio, Itamar Assumpção, Leon Hirszman, Carlos Reichenbach, Valério Arcary, Gal Costa, Mocidade Independente de Padre Miguel, Mangueira… even the things next door, like Bolaño, Spinetta, Lito Vitale, all these things which in a way were denied to us, in all its power, before the internet arose. All this “being American” generates a lot of mess, it generated a lot of torture and confusion here, in my house, in me, in a way that allowed me, at some point, to spread around a shitty view of things. I myself have spent a portion of the past decade mentally ill. I’m sure I got sick from Brazilian capitalism. Faced with the inability to be productive, to have a job in a hostile city, I began to desire a return to a tradition, to an order, sometimes as fanciful as it was strict and stupid. I had a disease of desire, which alienated some of my closest friends and was a terrible test of resilience for others. Unfortunately, I lost a lot of people in the process. Something that I later realized, with medical help, that was triggered by the dynamics of capital in contact with my being.

[“Being American”] also produced the murder of Brazil, now in recovery thanks to Lula. Imagine that, a guy capable of reversing the murder of a nation. It has generated a lot of disturbance, upheaval and disruption since forever. But the process of discovering the world and the fissures and conflicts in this composition of our anthropological, intimate history is very rich and I think it has to be valued. We weren’t born for perfection, we were born for the pursuit of new syntheses.

Then one day I started playing with harmonies on the old PC and for a couple of years I was like a Californian of the 1960s, baroque pop from the third world, from the garage, from the almost-noise. I knew how to compose some harmonies for 10, 11 voices, all of them my own, and they were really cool, I played with that a lot and I think they got complex and interesting, sophisticated, although all homemade. Brazil is a country of the homemade-scrappy-baroque-modern — true modern sensibility — and when you deny this, or invent a false and antimodern version of the “homemade”, like Bolsonarist neo-fascism, you just get fucked. Anyway, it turns out I was in a special article on the New Yorker by Sasha Frere Jones, and a lot of people were interested. After two years I lost my voice, and transferred my harmonies to other stylistic architectures, sound geographies and systems of writing and composition. And I think I’m still in it today, orchestrating with synths, instruments played, modified, scrapped, abducted.

Photo by Lunara Nascimento. Courtesy the artist

ACL: I’d like to ask you about titles, of both Teghnojoyg and its tracks. What is the process of naming a Babe, Terror artwork?

BT: I walk around, mostly late at night, thinking about tracks without necessarily listening to them. I think I feed off the issues and passions of the moment, although some are eternal. Geology, the petrochemical industry as a generator of extraterrestrial machinery (which communicates with my music in a dimension of cosmic textures), bicycles, cheap Italian films about Ancient Greece; I think I go through imaginary alphabets and glossaries that link these words in the “interidioms”, in the communicative frontier between different languages, their dysmorphisms, and I hunt constructions that catch me. I make music in a process of fun and rigor. I have fun looking for compositions and then developing and listening to them, and with the names it has to be something similar. Like watching a movie. It has to be encoded because it’s a peculiar world that I want to build or bring together with the record, and it has to be something that tells me something because of the sound, the imaginations contained in the saying. I don’t do anything conceptual really. Many times I can compose the “story” of the album after the fact, based on those mediumistic breaths – rather esoteric, really — that these titles conjure, but that begin in the ritual of joy and discipline in the search for compositions and ideas that seem simply too good to let slip away. I’ve been doing this since the 2017 record. I never really “think” an album or a track before making them. I just make, and I try to catch a name out of the forgotten glossary of a world or landscape that will emerge fully-formed and concrete.

ACL: There’s something of a magical undercurrent to it, I believe. As if the (re)mixing of words set some power over the world into motion, the possibility of willing something into place by naming it. Would you say there’s an “occultist” vein in your art?

BT: That’s right. I believe that the world is built and carved by a lot of something else, by sayings, by organized wills that react with the dialectical unconscious, and by magic itself. I don’t believe that much in the purely rational system, in the Christian sense of the word “rational”. I don’t believe that there is a complete reality outside of, or one that excludes, the ultra-technological and ultra-magical enigma of the human brain and its ancestors, the brains of gods, entities, fauna, planets. I compose the names like spells, thinking about the power I want the songs to establish in the places they pass through. I don’t seek a titanic superhuman power, but a supernatural power within-the-world, within-space and within-nature, capable of offering something extraordinary and surgical to my listeners, in the sense of to heal, and to bewilder. A certain current that makes you believe and places you in a wave of out-of-the-ordinary events, getting you lost.

I believe my music is good at penetrating night spaces, secret spaces, city spaces, because it is made for that, made out of that too. And made with the purpose of giving flesh to this magic of creating-to-mold, of speaking-to-concretize, of composing-to-materialize. Music is a bit like a city within a city. It is the experience of finding yourself in cities and in a certain city of yourself, within a city that already exists and its sometimes invisible. I don’t see music in any other way, music doesn’t act in me in any other way, and I have dedicated my entire life to that, even when I was an incipient composer at the age of 15. I do musical archaeological urbanism, I don’t know if I can call it like that. It sounds kind of pretentious, but I think the Portuguese language does that. It is a language of the seas, of traveling around the world, of sailing to create it. Brazil is a bigger Portugal with more garages. A colony that becomes a metropolis and a maritime power in the world of invisible entities. My music, as a possibility of generating spaces and discoveries, perhaps does not exist without this “school”. I’m a Marxist, and that’s why I’m materialist and anti-materialist at the same time. And I’m crazy and realistic at the same time.

ACL: There is also something of an archival procedure to the work you do. What archives did you “dig up” material from and how did you process that material?

BT: My method for everything, from archival science to composition, is a kind of rigorous anti-programming. I create a system of vague desires that are fed by unusual connections, in turn becoming speculation in a vast terrain, and that wild terrain offers things that were not previously imagined or prescribed in what was, so to speak, “the plan”, in what was “programmed”. Because I assume that not all species have been cataloged. In fact, on the contrary, most have not yet been, and they’re searching for us. That desire to find what might be, what I haven’t seen, guides me to find what satisfies me. What satisfies me is the beginning of the puzzle, which is nevertheless a malleable one. It creates new enigmas and riddles on its own as I assemble and build it.

I harvest from everywhere, but I always start from an idea, something specific but not that much. Like, for example, Turkish neighborhood parties in the 90s. Or I research records and traces of people more or less close to me, and I generate small micromontages and new meanings, at first vague, then more sophisticated. But the important thing is to say, perhaps, as Lucas Stamford from Fordmastiff has said, that the visual archives undergo an alchemical process, becoming something else, destined and reserved for the music. And music too, finds itself even more in what it really is when in contact with them, in this case film and video archives. The music reappears transmuted by this contact with the archive of flesh and bodies that start to tune in and calibrate themselves with my mind-desires at the time of editing. In my case, it is a robbery and a redesign of these archives, a readjustment, in which the power of a desire for composition starts to guide or redraw the deep meaning of that archival world. So they are mine, and they will never really be, because I’m offering the synthesis to the world. The relationship with the archive is not [being in itself] and [being-for-itself], having and not having. Like with those all-nighter bike parties in Detroit and Baltimore, I was never really there, but evidently I was there. I saw when people started to arrive and when the neighbors started to look around.

ACL: What is your selection process like, when it comes to sound collage? Would you say it’s a process of rationalized organization of sounds, or something else?

BT: I stay in the laboratory in the dark, testing potions and combinations between potions that seem to me to be the most exuberantly and excitingly possible, a luxury that is possible when you can imagine yourself composing in a garage, as I have always done. Made possible in this utopian and atypical garage. I think it’s fair to say that I imagine, first of all, where the music I create will exist, how it will be enjoyed, appreciated, how and where it will cause some delight. However, the concrete situations where people encounter my music can be very particular or peculiar. In Teghnojoyg, as in Fadechase Marathon (2018), for example, I imagined a street party in a moldy, closed, old place, a spontaneous party. And I thought of sonic volcanic matters, substances of intimate satisfaction that could catch someone emotionally. This is all too much to imagine.

I freely compose and arrange each piece, even if I’m using samples, because composition and harmonization are related to a very meticulous game about the presences and conversations between instrumental bodies, how they play with each other to make something emerge. I am a dreamer of imagined intimacies, invented in the pleasant freshness of city experience. As funereal as Horizogon (2021) might seem, I think I invented it as a “sticker” album or an “instrumental collectible cards” set, like the old Panini albums of fauna and vegetation, which people would collect as that world and its features could be/were possibly assimilated by them, transmitted to them, those drawings absorbed by them and their world. I use the headphone to draw every last detail, the folds, the densities, the rips, the penetrations between sounds and instruments, but even so I feel like a post-punk garage band, because I allow myself to do all of this with the right rigor, without being, in this baroque process, too restrictive. So I invent these party situations, or a “fauna stickers collection”, or the city really collapsing, as melting and rebuildable theaters in which people will have my music as an emotional vehicle for a really cool experiment with the body, with the mind. I imagine these desires of the city, within the city, and I realize them as habitable places, from my headphone to the people’s headphones. That’s why I think that records work on the move, in the city, in the shared and expandable intimacy of the walks. I imagine people existing satisfactorily out there in cities, and I imagine them alone with my music in some scenario risen from the desire to travel and glimpse pleasant and alienating forces. Alienating here meant in a good way.

People tell me that they reinterpret their cities and neighborhoods listening to my records walking around at 4 am. I assemble the records and instrumentation for these cities of refuge, for refugees from normality, and each record, be it Horizogon or Teghnojoyg or Birmania by Zpell Hologos, proposes a different cartography for this encounter with oneself in the city. I compose abstract cartographies with an interlocution of multiple instruments. That’s why I see it more as architecture than as a collage. And I don’t even think there’s an actual difference between what is played, or programmed, or sampled, etc. I’ve been dedicating myself to an industry of the unpredictable for years, manufacturing semi-toxic liquids that leak from a factory of unpredictability. And I think the process always starts with the authorship of a piece and, from there, its connection with ultra-composed unpredictability. The other day James Holden, who made an album this year that I really like, told me that Teghnojoyg has beautiful psychedelic insanities, and I think that’s what my factory is always intended for. I modulate the production that takes place within these facilities for exactly this.

ACL: From a historian’s perspective, an archive almost always means the place where the stuff we make history out of comes from – with its own processes of selection. What does the archive mean to you?

BT: An escape. A journey of Jason and the Argonauts through an Earth 2, through an uncharted continent. The return is uncertain. The return to uncertainty as a heated, intervened interplanetary vessel. A body. A piece of life. A kind of paranormal material made up of experiences that also come to live in me. An encounter with something that I was, not completely, not always, but that I can rebuild and relive through a new thread of life. The alliance between me and my blood and non-blood ancestors, but also those who have been feeling and breathing something that I now inherit. It’s a robbery, a scam. A way of appropriation to offer a meaning that never existed. Making the feral gentle.

ACL: The liner notes in Teghnojoyg describe how you’d like to “dig up” a secret stratum of your country, Brazil, a connective geographical layer that merges São Paulo with Detroit and Kingston, for instance. Is it a stratum in need of discovery, or invention, or something else altogether?

BT: This is the second time I’m writing an answer to this question. One thing that may be worth talking about, and which I might come back to later, is that I go out there and make my songs, pieces, and in that moment I don’t know what they are. I come from a school that perhaps operates in a different way to how the great wizards of experimentality do. I’m a fan of Brazilian music from the 60s, 70s, 80s, I’m a fan of progressive rock and obscure jazz fusion that were made in Scandinavia, Indonesia, Germany, and wanted to establish that same intercontinental cosmic bridge with Brazil. Not to mention that I’m very Brazilian, I’m a Jew from São Paulo with depressive tendencies, with a problematic middle-class family, personality problems, and these are my defining identities. I take them on, I assume them because I feel they are potent, not just out of honesty. Brazil is the artistic powerhouse, by the way. And I’m Brazilian too. Music is my vernacular, my vocabulary, both intellectually and emotionally. But in it, the emotional is predominant, dominating and encompassing the intellect, and in this perhaps we can define a more categorical difference between experiences of art and experiences of culture. Brazil was very artistic, and today it is more cultural. I particularly am not. But this is a natural dialectic within the development of a colony trying to grow as a real country. I’m a Brazilian musician who makes music to get excited, bewildered above all, and move others who want to join in the same frequency as I am. This is perhaps a search that is more commonly linked to art, and there are others that are identified with the construction of culture. I believe the two line up in eternal dialectical conflict in a revolutionary, or becoming-revolutionary space. I believe in that conflict.

I think that there are pleasures related to art in the, let’s say, European cultural interlocution, in the European conversation of the senses and sights related to literature, cinema, the forms that are more about speaking and showing stuff. I think there are pleasures in the foreign dialectic articulation that formed Brazilian music in the 70s. Milton Nascimento and his group communicating, without knowing it, with European jazz-rock, with Genesis. But, in the field of music, I think there is a stage of depression, a phase of loss, which can always return as a potent synthesis when – especially in the emancipatory and alien language of music – the vectors and agents are directed too much and hegemonically towards the field of culture. This happens a lot in Brazil for a lot of reasons. Firstly, because we are a colony. And then because, although an artistic powerhouse, we suffer from a serious cultural complex. People feel inferior. Middle-class people see themselves surrounded and nurtured by ‘heirs of culture’, and they want to be accepted into [elite] circles in order to survive, to gain some noble title in this ultra-capitalist, overseas aristocratic colony.

The largest university in São Paulo is a producer of clones of French and German thinkers who are proud of it. In Brazil, there are tiny spiritual colonies within little colonies within middle colonies within the big colony. In art, this system is translated as an environmental axis in which social, monetary gains and niche cultural recognition [greatly] ignite actions, [greatly] push to bear fruits. Brazil is a place of predation and poverty. A place of loss and despair, although not just solely. It’s not existence that counts, but how you say existence. This is nice and desirable where two thirds of the population are indebted, depressed and anguished with crime (that is, with capitalist apartheid policies that lead to crime), with misery. But existence is very much encapsulated by this arrangement of concretely saying existence.

When a system of interlocution is created with a musical, discursive, analytical and written rationality, an extreme and systematic rationality [that is European], as some of today’s Brazilian schools of niche experimentalists attempt, I believe [it] unbalances the game for the sovereignty of a genuine cultural code, and reveals, with great eloquence, a colony syndrome: a low self-esteem as a third world country, which is little noticed, but perfectly understandable. I remember the article written in A Closer Listen about Horizogon. An article totally sensitive to the album’s artistic process. Hardly anything like that would be written in Brazil. I love being third world and invent what I can with it. But the very root of my revolution is moving people.

That said, there is one caveat: certain hegemonic, local anthropology of music, [analytical in nature], speaks of the deconstruction of coloniality and exaltation of a foreign force that lives in Brazil: Brazil as novelty. A path to new entities. A path to the other sensibility for the world. And that’s right. I’m with them. But it seems to me that there is no real deconstruction. I’m not exactly making a criticism here, but a description of the scenario, and I draw a dividing line. I make music to get moved and to cause an emancipatory, transforming emotion, at least a pleasurable and inspiring one, and then I invent its “discourse”, the discourse of this music, the discourse that was there hovering secretly over the music, which is the precursor organism of everything to me, the art and the raw source of art from which all these operations are born and developed.

The secret stratum is the secret currents of feeling that create movement in this place, and movement leads to other places. The secret stratum is the place where we perceive these secret waves unleashing fictionalities, spaces and encounters. And the place where we can design the country, and other countries, deliberately. The secret stratum is the mass of high modernistic emotion.

From my point of view, the revolutionary experiment that is music meets perfectly with forgotten beauties, beauties not yet heard, the new beauties, the foreign elements, even if their “methods”, their programmatic grammars, are known. But I don’t care much for programmatic methods and grammars in this case. The method, the musical-analytical matter as a triumphant and predominant part, is exactly the semi-modernist European rationality (like, the discourse and mechanics of creation are further involved than emotional existence in music) expressing itself with great energy. It’s not a fragile energy. It’s very strong, it’s great, and managed in valuable experiments by valuable people. But I have been over this rationality of the “purest density”, which sometimes sounds like abstract European nostalgia at its peak. We all want to reach the mind circuits, offering mind-blowing things, but I really want to offer something for the spiritual brain, the emotional field of the brain. So I do my thing. If I return to emotionality, I don’t do it as a romantic, although maybe I am one. But I do it as someone interested in the vertigo and exuberance of the incredible-in-the-ordinary. Interested in the exuberance of the returning to the infinity of possibilities within the sphere of music itself. The music as a vehicle for deep, emotional and intimate experiences in one’s connection with the environment, whether concrete or invented. I do like to think of myself [in the role of] driver of a structure, an interstellar vessel and a probe for hunting and joining lavas, minerals, chemicals, rare earths, revealing a human architecture that is reconciling, but not pacifying. An architecture of well-being and of the excitement about an enveloping adventure. An architecture of beauty that paralyzes flows of thought that have already been explored, offering new abstractions, and, I hope, I try do this in kind of a dissident way.

It’s the feral and the gentle, what I attempt to do. This is my technique, that I’ve been developing for some time now. The beast becomes gentle the moment it starts to live with others and shares its ferocity in an intimate environment. But the feral is also there. And I invent these conceptual lines in the later part of the conception process of each album. There are these images, these videos, which I think not only complement, but bewitch and are bewitched by what I do. If you watch them without sound, the images speak for themselves. With music, they speak of larger universes. That said, I create these connections through my nose, through the action of intuition, and then I realize what is really being “said” by myself. What is said is perhaps something related to this secret, to this channel that connects these cities at a certain time. This is where I start from, and we all can, to think about what these bridges create. I think they create the perspective of a world to be listened to. And the very possibility of realizing that there are sentimental ecosystems beyond the one we live in, there is the possibility of other worlds. Not a world of the past, but of the extreme crossovers and deep amusement in the “quest”. I call the past here the rationalist pattern from which results the experience of a kind of expression, that in Brazil is mainly the product of a chain of previous canonical or neocanonical studies. I am aware this “existential debate” is good, though unbalanced today. These other worlds are buildings of the imaginative accumulation to be inhabited. Inhabited abstractly, not just symbolically. Emotionally inhabited. These discoveries of worlds are linked to a hunger that I have for navigation, a curiosity, but there is also a pre-intuition installed in my craft that there is much more to live with music, that there are worlds that do not yet exist, but come [to do so] with the human will, and can be visited by the scrapped tools and ships of capital: my material resources of production, the decaying houses to which the music takes us. Worlds that perhaps receive us and offer us a glimpse of the post-world, of post-worlds in the plural, that can be built despite capitalism and with the techniques of scrapping and technological deceleration of capital.

From this, more sophisticated, more compelling techniques emerge, those that I try to study, inside and outside my own creation. Techniques native to emotional worlds that dialogue over time, worlds of refuge that, with music, allow us to trace the free plan of an engineering of existence: one that arises despite the traumas and symbolic degradation imposed by capitalism (hyperproductivity, ultra-rationality, robotization of human experience and feelings). One can say my words sound hugely European, “denying” culture in favor of art, denying Europe, which is something that I could not do, to tell the truth. I think this kind of contradiction, the way I present it, is a very specifically Brazilian confusion, it’s some kind of crazy collage.

ACL: If I asked you to describe this spiritual geography (a network of leylines, perhaps), what sorts of lands, what sorts of peoples would we find there? What kinds of invisible connections is your music making?

BT: I am thinking of a kept, crystallized emotion in the caves and grottos of an archival imaginary of all times. From Rhodes and Argos to Tikal, but also from Iran in the 1950s to Chad before and a little after it became Chad, from the old Guineas to São Paulo with its sumptuous Joelma building and the historic fire of 1973. I think of my childhood years, because no matter how much I deny nostalgia and turn it into the goldsmith’s kiln of time, there is an inherent [desire] to “recapture” something special, although the better thing is to capture, forget, and then recapture it in other form, even in a damaged one. To capture for the first time what does not yet exist, what is forgotten by us but not by the universe, and it is asking to come into being, it is searching for us. It is not a want for living again, but maybe living in the still unlived crevices of a certain temporal-geographic space, in which I visit Kingston or Detroit when I was 15 when I wasn’t there. Or a São Paulo of streets, schools, which I didn’t go to, but now I visit like a ghost.

Anyway, I choose the whole. I choose them all, because I don’t know how to choose outside the specific process of musical composition. I always liked countries, the idea of a country. I collect football cards and stickers not because I love the sport so much, but because I love countries, the idea of a single community of spaces. I love the flags. In a way, I pursue these geographies on a bicycle at dawn, entering neighborhoods [at a] medium distance from me, in the city of São Paulo. Since at dawn nothing exists, everything exists. In other words, everything is crying out to emerge from the oblivion that is caused by our not seeing. Like a silent canvas in white and in the dark, it, this dawn, can be filled, in some places at least, with an infinity of “collages”, as you say, colors and selected and imagined parts of the past and future history of the world; of the forestry, architectural, technological, scientific and human history of the world and the city. Maybe the music, my music, evokes this, this path, I don’t know. The empty dawn, the dawn with nothing is a laboratory of unifying fictions and their sounds. I’m naïve and romantic, I am, but not idealistic. I am also an anti-materialist materialist, a resident of an industrial park of unpredictability, and perhaps in the ducts of this park there are these underground paths and roads for countries and times.

ACL: In your view, how could we conceive of those connections as an archive in itself?

BT: I am and will be an archive, won’t I?

I am sampleable, I am collapsible, collageble and I am revisitable by any beings and hunters in search of a company by conjuring the archaeology of my tracks, my albums and records.

ACL: What would you expect someone that is not from these places to find in this spiritual geography?

BT: Music, from my point of view, is a technology of the unforeseen, a form of travel, and what is yet to happen. This includes each person’s particular sentimental-geographic desires and abstractions. The question would be, rather, how I could conceive of a process to bring to my music the landscape that exists imprinted in the eyes and experiences of the people who happen to venture here, for instance, in Teghnojoyg.

ACL: This leads me to the question of memory and history, of course, which is central to your art. Conventionally, the difference between them lies in the living transformations of the past, seen as something malleable and unconstrained by the disciplinary boundaries and mostly written formats that the past takes when it comes to history. Is your work attempting to intervene the past in terms of memory, history, or perhaps both?

BT: One thing that I find interesting is the multiplicity of meanings that come with the word “past”, both in English and in Portuguese. Past, in English, is very close to the word “paste”, and when I think of the past as pasting, collage, I manage to unveil a whole horizon of possibilities for what is past. This “paste” mechanism is represented in various ways in my work. There is a paste procedure, based on what I compose, rearrange, shift and reshift. And more: ‘95 is here. ‘95 and Detroit are São Paulo 2023, for me, when I light the Teghnojoyg volcano. The peplum films of Goliath and Hercules in Italy in 1960 are the parades of the second division Samba Schools in Rio de Janeiro today. You take the events and paste them somewhere else. You combine events into a construct and destroy the predictable fabric of time, an act that is emancipatory from a historical point of view. Because no matter how much we make historical dialectical criticism, and that’s important, we are invited to the determinism produced by this machine of suggested sequentiality and logic. As if we were destined for something too. The world is sampling and manipulating sound.

Then I think of the word past in Portuguese, “passado”. It’s close to “passagem”, “passage” in English. Passage in the sense of “ticket”, the paper to go somewhere, to travel to a new place! And I think of “passage”, “passagem”, also as a secret passage to a forgotten point. And that’s how I feel the question: in these horizons formed by words, much is revealed. The world is built that way. I think the past is alive because it is unknown, largely forgotten, but sending its clues to our mind, in short. The unknown is always strong. Past is the unknown itself. We are allowed to create and not-create the unknown, create and decreate. We move balancing through the contradiction, and this is an adventure of knowledge. I treat the past as unknown as a way to emancipate the past from the past, because the past is trapped in the past (we are too, considerably). And the unknown, to be edited and filled with the “meat” of imaginations, is the source of all disturbance in our functional perception of time and life. It is healthy and revolutionary. The problem with libertarians and other types of crooks and nationalist fascists of the last wave (Trumpists, Bolsonarists) is corrupted nostalgia, poor reading and the clumsy redesign of the past, not the act itself of desiring “a new history of things”, a meeting point between novelty and the past.

Photo by Lunara Nascimento. Courtesy the artist

ACL: Speaking of which, you state in the liner notes that you are against nostalgia. Could you please explain further what nostalgia means to you and how your work acts against it?

BT: There’s a fine line between what I try to manufacture, living with my own music, and nostalgia. Nostalgia is a disease of redemption. If you look at the original meaning of nostalgia, you will see ideas like restoration and redemption at the root: it reminds me of another disease, the disease [that is] tradition. “Gia”. Traditalgia. Its complement is the disease of hatred directed to the now. And the now can be hated, I accept that they hate it, I hate it many times. But I prefer it when we love or are open to loving an “other now”, which can be manifested in our dissident, hopeful existences. I suffer from another illness, not redemption syndrome. I don’t want to go home, or redeem. I find this “coming home” –which is redemption, restoration– reactionary. I want not to redeem and restore, but to submerge and resurface with a new adventure on the Argo, even if I revisit the lands. I want, from the rubble, to discover the houses in which I have not lived and in which I can live. The videos from Teghnojoyg, which form a film, especially now with the bonus EP I will launch with more imagery, secretly talk about it. Living in those places. I’m from the Department of Urbanism and Housing and Mutation of Cities when I dream of the continuity of my pieces, a continuation which is the image of cinema. For me, cinema, especially with music, is the past always changing and being reborn as something special.

ACL: Do you think nostalgia could be mobilized for the benefit of your work?

BT: Redesigning the past, in the sense of rediscovering that forgotten body, eventually embracing the task of drawing it, giving the reencounter its pictorial power, seems challenging and revolutionary to me. There are processes in this exultant recognition of the past that has been forgotten, of the past that does not exist, that does not yet exist, that is inflamed with so much desire for existence, and is still unheard of…. There are processes there that can be ignited by some kind of feeling of “lack”, of “saudade” in Portuguese, which is nothing more than the feeling of lack, that what was lived or seen was not completely lived, not exhausted as a possibility or state. That is there, on my work, in some dosage. But the return is always different. Wanting to revisit affectively is not wanting to revive and restore. Affective revisiting reacts to today’s gaze with tremendous exuberance.

In the distance that creates perspective there is magic. The non-conformist desire for closeness comes with chemical by-products, comes with errors that I’m not interested in anymore, so to speak. I think it’s a strong contradiction. Nostalgia comes from restoration, I think restoration is interesting as an idea of passionate bizarreness, like the cheap, pinchbeck epic fantasy films produced in Italy I was talking about. But if you look at it, it’s also something else, the passionate bizarreness takes the thing far away from the past, the disease of the past, the traditalgia itself. I find it more interesting to visit what does not yet exist, and which is in the past. Creating the diaries of a North African merchant on a Greek island where he discovers tuberculosis, animals that could never exist in Greece, a little people who live a kind of primitive communism. Young people are placed in small boats as an initiation ritual of adult life and have to return in 2 years, some return after 80, without aging much. This “story” is basically one of my preferred Babe, Terror albums to date, Ancient M’ocean, my 2017 album. I’d have loved an ACL review at that time, and I invite readers to hear and download this one too. [Anyway,] this diary would be interesting, as well as 500,000 others, and who knows, maybe it could express exuberantly the “longing” that this merchant feels for this place after trying to make the same trip and getting lost. Even then, actually he just forgot the shit that happened to him there. To really restore… he wants to restore his spirit, the feeling of being there for the first time, and being that person. That’s nostalgia, and in itself it’s not worth much. Loving something that has passed, for example, the existence of someone who has died, is different. I believe in invented diaries. Carving documents out of scenarios that have solid manifestations in history, in our history. And then creating a trip.

ACL: I’d like to start drawing the interview to a close by asking you about joy in your work. The presence of enjoyment in this album runs against the possible interpretation of your works as apocalyptic, solely mournful. First, has joy always been a part of your art? Second, what role does it play in Teghnojoyg?

BT: This is actually the first answer I started working on. I am one of those who think that the apocalypse is not necessarily contrary to joy. And I think that way for many reasons. Pre-Revolution Tzarist Russia, China of the nationalist-capitalist Kuomintang party at the turn of the 40s to the 50s, are apocalyptic scenarios. The revolution itself is the dialectical movement that invents the scenario, the space, people’s lives, in an apocalypse of phases.

I can think of the apocalypse as a pre-revolutionary moment, which cosmically summons a coming together of needs, desires and excitements ripe for bursting. But also as the revolutionary process itself: the point at which the old mercantile structures rot once and for all, so that, with a powerful, almost carnal impact and the desire for justice of millions, a new life can take hold. Bolsonaro’s Brazil is, in its way, an apocalyptic Brazil. And believe me, it still is, because Bolsonarism is a hegemonic flow of thought, because Bolsonaro is not only affiliated with capitalism, he is capitalism. Bolsonarism is capitalism’s rotten mutation. It is a hegemonic flow that [nonetheless] lost elections because Lula is the last of the great statesmen. Lula is not an old-school revolutionary, but he has his own skill, his own magic, which is the belief in an impossible class conciliation in Brazil.

It’s very interesting because we here today — and it doesn’t even take that much study to reach the conclusion — know that the only solution for Brazil is, and I’ll put it in mild terms, the realization of class struggle in more serious terms. It is prison for more or less 2 million ultra-bourgeois, oligarchs and their heirs, parasites that built their privileges with slavery, continuing a bloody colonization. I’m talking about industrialists who manipulate legislation for poor people to die at hospital doors, for contractors to demolish or burn humble houses that are already precarious, apologists for Bolsonarism and the criminalization of communism. The owners of the country, who don’t want to pay taxes, who program Brazilian peripheral capitalism to literally kill people and make the state leaner, preventing peace at home, subjecting employees to 10-hour workdays in which they swallow the heavy trash of corporate language, obstructing a fully-fledged cultural revolution and the maturing of the country and humanity. These people, well, these pathological men and their families, still have a predominant role in building the country’s destiny. We are dealing with troglodytes and landowners [camouflaged in culture and advanced human sciences], who display a certain primitivism, and who are, from an internationalist point of view, not only anti-democratic warriors, but rodents of the threads that would allow democracy to take citizenship leaps in Brazil.

It’s a kind of “apocalypse”.

But Lula doesn’t think so. In his 20s he sat in union negotiations with industrialists who, in 1977, were 78, 79 years old. Crafty elderly people at that time, who were born at the beginning of the Republic, at the end of the 19th century. Being educated people, with a strict education often outside the country, they sound correct. This Lula grew up believing that there was a possible and honest conversation with these people from big business, their children, grandchildren. He grew up believing that a “non-apocalyptic” reconciliation was possible. And Lula is so good, so much of a wizard, that just because of this belief of his, with the mere existence of the belief and its methodological organization, he ended up creating a kind of effective artificial conciliation. A parallel-world Brazil in which there is development, “progress”, as much as I don’t like the word, even with a rotten elite. Even with a rich class rotting in plain sight for decades.

Even with all the appeasement, Brazil’s financial elite are so scatterbrained, incapable of empathy, and savage, that we almost had a Capitol invasion of our own, here, on January 8th. And there weren’t white entrepreneurial degenerates, tractor-wielding pedophile cowboys, jaded indie cultural icons, Trumpists, and feeble-minded supporters of “freedom” and “America’s uniqueness/exceptionality” (I’ve met Americans who actually believe in that perverse fairytale). In the Brasilia attack, all the classes poisoned by Brazilian-style libertarian capitalist fascism were gathered, breaking everything. Including people whose lives were saved by Lula, 20 years ago, when he inaugurated a semi-welfare state.

Anyway, Lula manages to cast some magic. Today it is him who is 80 years old. Soon he will no longer be on the scene. When that happens, either Brazil returns to the cycle of progressively corrosive capitalist aggression, spiraling towards the neo-fascist/Bolsonarist scenario again, towards the programmed regression to the Middle Ages and colonization; or the country invents something from the struggle. I believe that in both situations, there is some kind of a different apocalypse coming. There is no dialogue with the Brazil of its founding (slavery, privileges, the mobster financial elite), which is the dominant Brazil of today. There is no dialogue with the Brazilian rich people, their heirs, disciples, and this will eventually erupt as the experienced truth that it is.

If my music is the soundtrack, it is not only the soundtrack for this apocalyptic situation, but also for the memory that encompasses the predecessing moments of these events, such as Covid-19, the 90s and the beginning of the legitimization of ultracapitalism; and at the same time, of this almost ghostly dimension of interesting streams, house parties, absence of internet, cheap vinyl collections, handmade sticker collections, almost handmade everything… In short, this constellation of events typical of a capitalist world melting and becoming monstrous, which on the other hand opens up for high-intensity art, suggests a need for refuge on new journeys… If my music is this soundtrack, I believe it is in a good place.

Today is the apocalypse. And today allows me to make this album, which is an escapist and profound journey into a dimension of geological radiations of my mind and my experience in São Paulo and other São Paulos that I am architecting. The apocalypse is important to understand my music because the apocalypse is the scenario of radical transformations or its exact previous moment, it is the moment of some movement of dialogue between the broken world and the possible/impossible world, and maybe it is this harmonic synthesis that I seek above all else. Ancient M’ocean was my first, some say my greatest achievement, under this logic. Apocalypse is some kind of music. I don’t consider harmony just the codified play of notes and chords, but the corporeal relationships between the instruments, and how each one can throw the other into another dimension of construction in the dark that is orchestration. I try to be Jokic imagining himself a Yugoslav number 10 in the ‘54 World Cup, and at the same time as a quarterback from the 80s, but playing basketball. I try to play it wrong and play for the inter-world movement, not just play the end of the world and its core of feelings. I’ve been trying this with harmony and sonic instrumental play for a good 16 years so far. I am not Western, Brazil is not located in the West, and we have the advantage and privilege, in this non-Western ontological world, of always being able to wait for the apocalypse as a possibility. Apocalypse as an event that precedes or establishes some strange order from another world. My records perhaps reveal a belief or foresee the emotional fabric of a Brazil of Synthesis, a Brazil that I don’t know. I find it deeply apocalyptic and therefore deeply hopeful.

ACL: Is there something joyful in the album art you designed for Teghnojoyg?

Totally. I think to be wandering around the city, the heart of the city at dawn, drinking the undisturbed constellations in the sky and the pollution in, with a thousand petroleum gases at the same time forming these layers of nightly textures, and wow, to come across an old FIAT with a bucket, the elderly work donkey of our times, this car on fire, and then being able to watch the end of the process, and to photograph this disintegrated but completely reformed body, as if it had morphed joining the concrete of bridges and sidewalks… And look, it’s a body that, when burned, caused no pain to its bearer, I think this whole situation is very lucky. Certainly the owner had insurance, so I didn’t feel bad for this worker either. I find the situation itself very joyful, a miracle. Being able to record this mutation in the middle of a silent nocturnal landscape of the town is a joy. There is joy in the punch of improbability, and there is joy in the forms that meet and condense in the mixture of atmospheric textures, twisted iron, industrially dense colors, São Paulo bitumen soils. There is joy because, once the gaze is calibrated to intuit and recompose these things, once the gaze is enchanted to the point of conjugating it with a magical scene beyond the simple concreteness of the scene itself, giving it a sense of composition in improvisation, a sense of deliberate organization of an almost spectral urban dystopia, a kind of exceptional laboratory phenomenon emerges. There is joy because when all this takes place and is systematized not by discourse, but in a certain version of “fantasy”, there is beauty, a new beauty. This system of phenomena that ignites from the destroyed and shattered that encounter the improbable, that are reborn in the finding, in rediscovery, is a system of new beauties, and is perfectly joyful.

ACL: Thank you so much for your time. Is there anything else you’d like to tell our readers before we close the interview up?

BT: I would first like to thank you, David and A Closer Listen, which is a very important site. Thank you for your dedication and for your skillful and super thought-provoking questions, which ended up inspiring me to go very, very far sometimes. I wanted to say that I find most music-streaming platforms terribly dull, except for Bandcamp, which is the only one I pay attention to. So a disclaimer here, this Teghnojoyg record is certainly one of my most powerful works to date. I hope people like it. And anyone who buys on Bandcamp will simply get extra 35 minutes of music, plus all the videos related to the Teghnojoyg process. It’s an hour and a half of inventive musical cinema and poisonous and bewitched archival imagery essays communicating with the music. Anyone who buys on Bandcamp gets a Babe, Terror album inside the Babe, Terror album! And the cinema made out of it. These tracks on this bonus EP could be on the main album. They form a separate EP because they connect perfectly together, almost in a single sequence. I think it will delight anyone who enjoys my stuff.

*Editor’s note 1: Left the original Brazilian Portuguese wording because the artist says that the phrase is impossible to really translate, noting that it would be like “full o Ginga”, samba fueled, Brazilian football “code”, something full of “spell”, or that the name is a “spell”.