"THE SLUDGE" OF THE LAND" By Babau

Babau, the Italian duo of Luigi Monteanni and Matteo Pennesi, push the legacy of exotica into the present with The Sludge of the Land, a mind-bending exploration of what they call post-exoticism. Drawing from decades of global sound, experimental collage, and sonic subcultures, the album dismantles nostalgic fantasy and rebuilds it into something unstable, provocative, and unmistakably contemporary.

In the year 1957 Martin Denny, the leader of his band came out with an album called Exotica. This was seventy years before Babau released their new album The Sludge of the Land which is part of the style they call post-exoticism. Babaus album The Sludge of the Land is really different from what Martin Denny did, with Exotica. This was a time when people still remembered the Hawaiian Kingdom being overthrown. The composer from New York City and his band were working with Don the Beachcomber at a Hilton hotel in Honolulu. Don the Beachcomber was a name in "tiki culture". The composer and his band had created a style of music that was easy to listen to. This music had animal sounds in it. It also had Latin pop music influences. They used a lot of instruments from Asia and Polynesia like shamisen and gamelan.

The music of the composer and his band became very popular over the world. In the places that exotica artists, like the composer and his band dreamed about their music was a hit. Exotica music was everywhere. The Japanese band Yellow Magic Orchestra was really good, at using sampling in music. They did this before hip-hop and techno music were popular. Yellow Magic Orchestra made a version of Dennys song "Firecracker". They made it sound really futuristic in 1978 with synth-pop music. This version of "Firecracker" is fun to listen to because it's catchy.. Yellow Magic Orchestra also changed the parts of the song that sounded too much like stereotypical Asian music.

Let us move forward to the year 2025. At this time the methods of taking things and putting them back together in a new way and also taking parts of different things and combining them have become a normal part of music that is trying new things. The people who make this music take the old and the new. They look at these things with a fresh perspective. They take the leftover pieces from the past. The present and they use these to make something new. The music makers are using music to take the odds and ends and make them into something that people can listen to today. Experimental music is where these tactics of recombination and pastiche are being used. Babau is a duo made up of Luigi Monteanni and Matteo Pennesi. They have been doing music for over ten years. They started with cassette labels. Now they help other musicians who make similar music. They have their label called Artetetra. They also have an event in Milan called Future Pidgin. Lots of musicians have performed at Future Pidgin, including Carl Stone and Foodman. Luigi Monteanni and Matteo Pennesi have also done some work. They have studied what they call sonic subcultures. Babau is really, into music. They want to share it with everyone. The new album from Babau, The Sludge of the Land is really going to mess with your mind. It looks at the stuff that is behind the music that people think is good. When you listen to an album like The Sludge of the Land you have to ask yourself: How do you come up with something when you are using old things? What can you do with all the music you have taken from everywhere? Babau says you should just keep mixing it all. Babaus music is about taking old music and making it new again. The Sludge of the Land is an example of what Babau can do, with this kind of music.

Babaus music is really impressive when you first hear it. There are a lot of groups like Hausu Mountain that make loud and crazy music with computers.. Babaus song "The sound of a continent moving…" is something special. It has a sound with strong drums. You can hear toy keyboards and saxophones making noises over the top of the drums. It is like a show with a lot of things happening at the same time and it feels like it could all fall apart at any moment like a person spinning a lot of plates and trying not to drop them. Babaus music is full of surprises. It is really fun to listen to. The way the drums and keyboards and saxophones all work is really interesting and it makes you want to keep listening to see what happens next, with Babaus music. There are songs that get really weird and funky like the psychedelic sound on "As long as blue hours unravel…". This song has a bunch of noises like cartoonish cricket sounds that are almost as loud, as the silly snake charmer music. Babau takes ideas from exotic music and library music and they also use things from experimental music that people who shop at Boomkat will know. The bag of tricks–Ikue Mori sample-trigger rituals, Orange Milk-adjacent MIDI choir theatrics, Valentina Magaletti kitchen-sink drum thwacking, dubby Sun Araw haze–is endless, but cohesive.

The music has many sounds and effects that it is really hard to pick out the folk music parts that show up every now and then like when you hear a gamelan or a pan-flute. If you try to figure out what is going on you might end up looking silly. It is like when you have to delete a lot of things from your phone to make space or when you quickly scroll through all the sounds on an old Nintendo game. The individual sounds are not really connected to where they came from so hearing them all at the same time is really confusing. The folk music parts, like the gamelan and the pan-flute get lost in all the sounds and effects. Francesco Piro, the producer mixes the album in a way that makes it sound really strange and weird. He does a job of making it sound like the music is not just a few people playing in a room. The album does not sound too perfect or fake like some other albums that use a lot of computer sounds.. When you compare it to music that is clearly made by people who like to experiment and make noise like Moth Cock or to music made by younger artists who are really influenced by the internet Babaus music sounds like it does not really fit in anywhere. Babaus music sounds a bit like it is missing a sense of place. If you listen to the album for a while you will probably like how it sounds. The album has a feeling to it like a room that is always the same temperature. It is of like being in a garden but instead of plants it is like a computer generated world that is very relaxed like someone who is very calm and happy. The album is, like a place, a digital greenhouse where everything is calm and peaceful.

The album does a lot of things at the time using real instruments computer sounds and samples. This can be really good. The music comes together in a great way.. Sometimes the album is just too much and it is hard to listen to. The music can be annoying. It sounds like the people who made it were just messing around and trying to be funny. The album is like that a lot, with sounds that're all, over the place and do not always make sense. The title of "Wunderkammer Unbound" is German for "cabinet of curiosities". This was like a room in old European houses where people kept weird and interesting things. It was like a museum. In their home. The music of "Wunderkammer Unbound" is like this room. It has lots of sounds like things you find in nature and things that are man made. These sounds are all mixed up together in a way. It is, like a bunch of scenes. In one of these scenes you can hear a bird chirping.. Then the bird sound gets changed and sounds really high. It sounds like the bird has forgotten it is a living thing and thinks it is a machine instead. The bird sound just keeps going and going. When the music falls into the glide it gets interrupted by weird and scary vocals that sound like a younger Mark Stewart. The best parts are when all the crazy noise goes away and you can hear nice and shiny chords. These nice sounds are like what Jon Hassell did, with his " world" music and the old days of computer music. The Sludge of the Land attempts to break new ground by retreading pathways that have, over the years, become intuitive, and Babau harness a sense of possibility that’s almost quaint. They capture the pleasure of learning how to muck around with whatever tools fascinate you, calling back to previous artists who’ve done the same with their own fraught collisions of technology and fantasy. It’s a well-produced, well-executed mess.

Mason Morgan