Claudio Katz Szynkier, aka Babe, Terror, is an avant-garde electro composer based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. A genius unknown to the general public, but a shining star in today’s music firmament. His album Horizogon was named one of the best Global Albums of 2020 by The Guardian, and his previous album, Fadechase Marathon, was named Best Electronic Album of 2018 by Bandcamp.
Technojoyg is his most recent opus, just out of the studio, and probably his best to date. It’s the most abundant in ideas, the most sparkling, the most mesmerizing (but coherent), the most rooted in the perspective of 21st-century music, with its stimulating holistic fusion of electro and symphonic, high and low art, sensory effects and intellectual depth.
We hear a symphony orchestra, ethereal piano, cutting-edge electro and adorable old synths and other minimalist vintage gizmos on the comeback trail, but blossoming and deployed in a context of very advanced sound research. Put Vangelis and Rachmaninov together, add Daft Punk and a bit of Autechre, and stubbornly refuse to mention them too specifically. End up with something completely different, unique, and you’re getting close.
The Technojoyg universe of Babe, Terror is a swirling cosmogony, caught in the act by the James Webb telescope. Galaxies metamorphose into colourful nebulae and astonishing exo-planetary systems. In the background, we receive radio signals from Earth, dozens of them, all different and swapping in and out of each other. There’s a spellbinding sense of sensory fulfilment. There’s something of the totally intoxicating symphonies of Robert Simpson about it.
‘’Teghnojoyg is the result of a 2 years process of composition and debugging. From my point of view, it’s an orchestral and intimate celebration of buried, bewitched sounds, rotten machines in the process of semi-organic disappearance and disintegration. There’s a decaying junkyard magnetic force in the East and North sides of São Paulo, specially North, a complex, mountainous strange residential territory, that lives between samba, the local militia and the culture of Bingo game houses. A vast space -—Brasilândia, Lauzane, Imirim are some neighborhoods-— in which some kind of delicious and strange cultural communion occurred 40 years ago, at least I can imagine that. I think the new album took some rotten car liquids and poison and it generated some futuristic reflection on possible urban communities of the past”
- Claudio Katz Szynkier, alias Babe, Terror
If you buy the album on Bandcamp, you get a 35-minute bonus EP and an exclusive downloadable video.
This could be the start of a Daft Punk-ian school of post-Tron Legacy electro-symphonic music that’s well worth following. If Tron was all Romantic, Technojoyg is surely the post-impressionist version of the genre.
Fabulous.
