I’ve written about this guy Babe, Terror before here, but he emailed me about a new track he’d posted the other day, and I think it might be his best one yet.
It’s called “Summertime Our League”, and you can find it on his Myspace. Again, the obvious comparison is with Animal Collective (who are playing Babe, Terror’s hometown of Sao Paolo soon, I think), but this more than ever is about the possible scientific/emotional experiments that can be conducted on the human voice. If you need a specific AC reference, I’d actually go for Panda Bear’s “Young Prayer” solo album; that gaseous, nebulous melancholy built out of wordless falsetto.
We’re advised to listen to this one on headphones, which makes sense. Watch out, though: what initially seems immersive, chorally soothing, gets pretty disorienting with some vicious jump-edits and a smear of distortion that jars somewhere around the middle of its eight-minute run.
Lovely, still. Every time Babe, Terror (he’s called Claudio, really) emails with a new track, it makes me naively excited about where we’ve come to with online musical communties: that a man making fearless and uncommercial ethereal music in Brazil, stuff of value that I’d like, can come to my attention so easily. It’s nice to see, too, that I’m not alone: Arto Lindsay appears to have booked him for the Worldtronics festival in Berlin at the end of the month.
Talking of Animal Collective yet again, the obsession with “Merriweather Post Pavilion” only gets stronger and deeper, happily. Can I say once more, though, that while I understand how frustrating the teasing nature of these blogs can sometimes be, I’m afraid I’m never going to leak this or any other promo I get sent, no matter how many times you send me emails like “LEAK THE FUCKING ALBUM!” Just saying.